ASN's Mission

To create a world without kidney diseases, the ASN Alliance for Kidney Health elevates care by educating and informing, driving breakthroughs and innovation, and advocating for policies that create transformative changes in kidney medicine throughout the world.

learn more

Contact ASN

1401 H St, NW, Ste 900, Washington, DC 20005

email@asn-online.org

202-640-4660

The Latest on X

Kidney Week

Please note that you are viewing an archived section from 2019 and some content may be unavailable. To unlock all content for 2019, please visit the archives.

Abstract: TH-PO1117

Predicting Health Outcomes for Elderly Renal Transplant Recipients with Machine Learning

Session Information

Category: Transplantation

  • 1902 Transplantation: Clinical

Authors

  • Fu, Rui, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  • Mitsakakis, Nicholas, Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, THETA Collaborative, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  • Luo, Kai, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  • Coyte, Peter C., University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Background

Application of machine learning to nephrology research has been scarce. In this study, we demonstrated the use of classification algorithms in predicting all-cause death at three-year among elderly deceased-donor renal transplant recipients.

Methods

This is a retrospective, population-based, cohort study of all cases of deceased-donor renal transplants performed in Ontario, Canada from March 31, 2002 to April 1, 2013. Recipients aged over 70 years were followed up until death or to April 1, 2016. Bootstrap-aggregating classification tree and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) were used to train a predictive model for death at three-year post-transplant. Patient-level attributes at the time of transplantation, including demographic characteristics, lab results, transplant information, comorbidities, and pre-transplant health care utilization, were examined as potential determinants of post-transplant death. A ratio of 3:2 was used to construct training and testing sets. Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique was applied to generate artificial positive cases (death) and under-sample negative cases (alive) in the training set to reduce bias. Models were trained and tuned using ten-fold cross-validation on the training set and tested on the specificity and sensitivity of prediction using the testing set.

Results

Among 275 elderly transplant recipients, the majority (n=271, 98.5%) were transplanted at 71-80 years and four (1.5%) were older than 80 years. Death occurred in 52 (18.9%) cases at three-year post-transplant. Before sampling, classification tree and KNN had test sensitivity of 0.11 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.01-0.33) and 0.07 (95% CI, 0-0.18), respectively, while both achieving 0.95 (95% CI, 0.88-0.98) specificity. After sampling, classification tree and KNN achieved test sensitivity of 0.21 (95% CI, 0.06-0.46) and 0.26 (95% CI, 0.03-0.50), respectively, as well as test specificity of 0.89 (95% CI, 0.81-0.95) and 0.84 (95% CI, 0.74-0.90), respectively.

Conclusion

Our findings add to the growing body of knowledge aimed at improving the performance of risk calculators (e.g., iChoose Kidney) that help patients and families to make informed decisions in renal care. Furthermore, our study confirmed the strength of machine learning techniques in population-based nephrology research despite our limited sample size and the rarity of the outcomes assessed.