Criticality of Nursing Care for Patients With Alzheimer’s Disease in the ICU: Insights From MIMIC III Dataset

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) exhibit varying survival outcomes due to the unique challenges in managing AD patients. Stratifying patient mortality risk and understanding the criticality of nursing care are important to improve the clinical outcomes of AD patients. This study aimed to leverage machine learning (ML) and electronic health records (EHRs) only consisting of demographics, disease history, and routine lab tests, with a focus on nursing care, to facilitate the optimization of nursing practices for AD patients. We utilized Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III, an open-source EHR dataset, and AD patients were identified based on the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision codes. From a cohort of 453 patients, a total of 60 features, encompassing demographics, laboratory tests, disease history, and number of nursing events, were extracted. ML models, including XGBoost, random forest, logistic regression, and multi-layer perceptron, were trained to predict the 30-day mortality risk. In addition, the influence of nursing care was analyzed in terms of feature importance using values calculated from both the inherent XGBoost module and the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) library. XGBoost emerged as the lead model with a high accuracy of 0.730, area under the curve (AUC) of 0.750, sensitivity of 0.688, and specificity of 0.740. Feature importance analyses using inherent XGBoost module or SHAP both indicated the number of nursing care within 14 days post-admission as an important denominator for 30-day mortality risk. When nursing care events were excluded as a feature, stratifying patient mortality risk was also possible but the model’s AUC of receiver operating characteristic curve was reduced to 0.68. Nursing care plays a pivotal role in the survival outcomes of AD patients in ICUs. ML models can be effectively employed to predict mortality risks and underscore the importance of specific features, including nursing care, in patient outcomes. Early identification of high-risk AD patients can aid in prioritizing intensive nursing care, potentially improving survival rates.