Establishing an artificial intelligence-based predictive model for long-term health-related quality of life for infected patients in the ICU

Objective: To develop a model using a Chinese ICU infection patient database to predict long-term health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in survivors. Methods: A patient database from the ICU of the Fourth People's Hospital in Zigong was analyzed, including data from 2019 to 2020. The subjects of the study were ICU infection survivors, and their post-discharge HRQOL was assessed through the SF-36 survey. The primary outcomes were the physical component summary (PCS) and mental component summary (MCS). We used artificial intelligence techniques for both feature selection and model building. Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression was used for feature selection, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) was used for model building, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) was used to assess model performance. Results: The study included 917 ICU infection survivors. The median follow-up was 507.8 days. Their SF-36 scores, including PCS and MCS, were below the national average. The final prognostic model showed an AUROC of 0.72 for PCS and 0.63 for MCS. Within the sepsis subgroup, the predictive model AUROC values for PCS and MCS were 0.76 and 0.68, respectively. Conclusions: This study established a valuable prognostic model using artificial intelligence to predict long-term HRQOL in ICU infection patients, which supports clinical decision making, but requires further optimization and validation.