Impact of nutrition-related laboratory tests on mortality of patients who are critically ill using artificial intelligence: A focus on trace elements, vitamins, and cholesterol.

Background: This study aimed to understand the collective impact of trace elements, vitamins, cholesterol, and prealbumin on patient outcomes in the intensive care unit (ICU) using an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) model for mortality prediction.

Methods: Data from ICU patients (December 2016 to December 2021), including serum levels of trace elements, vitamins, cholesterol, and prealbumin, were retrospectively analyzed using AI models. Models employed included category boosting (CatBoost), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), light gradient boosting machine (LGBM), and multilayer perceptron (MLP). Performance was evaluated using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The performance was evaluated using 10-fold crossvalidation. The SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) method provided interpretability.

Results: CatBoost emerged as the top-performing individual AI model with an AUROC of 0.756, closely followed by LGBM, MLP, and XGBoost. Furthermore, the ensemble model combining these four models achieved the highest AUROC of 0.776 and more balanced metrics, outperforming all models. SHAP analysis indicated significant influences of prealbumin, Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II score, and age on predictions. Notably, the ratios of selenium to age and low-density lipoprotein to total cholesterol also had a notable impact on the models' output.

Conclusion: The study underscores the critical role of nutrition-related parameters in ICU patient outcomes. Advanced AI models, particularly in an ensemble approach, demonstrated improved predictive accuracy. SHAP analysis offered insights into specific factors influencing patient survival, highlighting the need for broader consideration of these biomarkers in critical care management.