A machine learning approach to predict intravenous immunoglobulin resistance in Kawasaki disease patients: A study based on a Southeast China population

Kawasaki disease is the leading cause of pediatric acquired heart disease. Coronary artery abnormalities are the main complication of Kawasaki disease. Kawasaki disease patients with intravenous immunoglobulin resistance are at a greater risk of developing coronary artery abnormalities. Several scoring models have been established to predict resistance to intravenous immunoglobulin, but clinicians usually do not apply those models in patients because of their poor performance. To find a better model, we retrospectively collected data including 753 observations and 82 variables. A total of 644 observations were included in the analysis, and 124 of the patients observed were intravenous immunoglobulin resistant (19.25%). We considered 7 different linear and nonlinear machine learning algorithms, including logistic regression (L1 and L1 regularized), decision tree, random forest, AdaBoost, gradient boosting machine (GBM), and lightGBM, to predict the class of intravenous immunoglobulin resistance (binary classification). Data from patients who were discharged before Sep 2018 were included in the training set (n = 497), while all the data collected after 9/1/2018 were included in the test set (n = 147). We used the area under the ROC curve, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity to evaluate the performances of each model. The gradient GBM had the best performance (area under the ROC curve 0.7423, accuracy 0.8844, sensitivity 0.3043, specificity 0.9919). Additionally, the feature importance was evaluated with SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) values, and the clinical utility was assessed with decision curve analysis. We also compared our model with the Kobayashi score, Egami score, Formosa score and Kawamura score. Our machine learning model outperformed all of the aforementioned four scoring models. Our study demonstrates a novel and robust machine learning method to predict intravenous immunoglobulin resistance in Kawasaki disease patients. We believe this approach could be implemented in an electronic health record system as a form of clinical decision support in the near future.