No Arabic abstract
Diabetes affects over 400 million people and is among the leading causes of morbidity worldwide. Identification of high-risk individuals can support early diagnosis and prevention of disease development through lifestyle changes. However, the majority of existing risk scores require information about blood-based factors which are not obtainable outside of the clinic. Here, we aimed to develop an accessible solution that could be deployed digitally and at scale. We developed a predictive 10-year type 2 diabetes risk score using 301 features derived from 472,830 participants in the UK Biobank dataset while excluding any features which are not easily obtainable by a smartphone. Using a data-driven feature selection process, 19 features were included in the final reduced model. A Cox proportional hazards model slightly overperformed a DeepSurv model trained using the same features, achieving a concordance index of 0.818 (95% CI: 0.812-0.823), compared to 0.811 (95% CI: 0.806-0.815). The final model showed good calibration. This tool can be used for clinical screening of individuals at risk of developing type 2 diabetes and to foster patient empowerment by broadening their knowledge of the factors affecting their personal risk.
Background: Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are among the leading causes of death worldwide. Predictive scores providing personalised risk of developing CVD are increasingly used in clinical practice. Most scores, however, utilise a homogenous set of features and require the presence of a physician. Objective: The aim was to develop a new risk model (DiCAVA) using statistical and machine learning techniques that could be applied in a remote setting. A secondary goal was to identify new patient-centric variables that could be incorporated into CVD risk assessments. Methods: Across 466,052 participants, Cox proportional hazards (CPH) and DeepSurv models were trained using 608 variables derived from the UK Biobank to investigate the 10-year risk of developing a CVD. Data-driven feature selection reduced the number of features to 47, after which reduced models were trained. Both models were compared to the Framingham score. Results: The reduced CPH model achieved a c-index of 0.7443, whereas DeepSurv achieved a c-index of 0.7446. Both CPH and DeepSurv were superior in determining the CVD risk compared to Framingham score. Minimal difference was observed when cholesterol and blood pressure were excluded from the models (CPH: 0.741, DeepSurv: 0.739). The models show very good calibration and discrimination on the test data. Conclusion: We developed a cardiovascular risk model that has very good predictive capacity and encompasses new variables. The score could be incorporated into clinical practice and utilised in a remote setting, without the need of including cholesterol. Future studies will focus on external validation across heterogeneous samples.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created an urgent need for robust, scalable monitoring tools supporting stratification of high-risk patients. This research aims to develop and validate prediction models, using the UK Biobank, to estimate COVID-19 mortality risk in confirmed cases. From the 11,245 participants testing positive for COVID-19, we develop a data-driven random forest classification model with excellent performance (AUC: 0.91), using baseline characteristics, pre-existing conditions, symptoms, and vital signs, such that the score could dynamically assess mortality risk with disease deterioration. We also identify several significant novel predictors of COVID-19 mortality with equivalent or greater predictive value than established high-risk comorbidities, such as detailed anthropometrics and prior acute kidney failure, urinary tract infection, and pneumonias. The model design and feature selection enables utility in outpatient settings. Possible applications include supporting individual-level risk profiling and monitoring disease progression across patients with COVID-19 at-scale, especially in hospital-at-home settings.
Prediction of diabetes and its various complications has been studied in a number of settings, but a comprehensive overview of problem setting for diabetes prediction and care management has not been addressed in the literature. In this document we seek to remedy this omission in literature with an encompassing overview of diabetes complication prediction as well as situating this problem in the context of real world healthcare management. We illustrate various problems encountered in real world clinical scenarios via our own experience with building and deploying such models. In this manuscript we illustrate a Machine Learning (ML) framework for addressing the problem of predicting Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) together with a solution for risk stratification, intervention and management. These ML models align with how physicians think about disease management and mitigation, which comprises these four steps: Identify, Stratify, Engage, Measure.
By equipping a previously reported dynamic causal model of COVID-19 with an isolation state, we modelled the effects of self-isolation consequent on tracking and tracing. Specifically, we included a quarantine or isolation state occupied by people who believe they might be infected but are asymptomatic, and only leave if they test negative. We recovered maximum posteriori estimates of the model parameters using time series of new cases, daily deaths, and tests for the UK. These parameters were used to simulate the trajectory of the outbreak in the UK over an 18-month period. Several clear-cut conclusions emerged from these simulations. For example, under plausible (graded) relaxations of social distancing, a rebound of infections within weeks is unlikely. The emergence of a later second wave depends almost exclusively on the rate at which we lose immunity, inherited from the first wave. There exists no testing strategy that can attenuate mortality rates, other than by deferring or delaying a second wave. A sufficiently powerful tracking and tracing policy--implemented at the time of writing (10th May 2020)--will defer any second wave beyond a time horizon of 18 months. Crucially, this deferment is within current testing capabilities (requiring an efficacy of tracing and tracking of about 20% of asymptomatic infected cases, with less than 50,000 tests per day). These conclusions are based upon a dynamic causal model for which we provide some construct and face validation, using a comparative analysis of the United Kingdom and Germany, supplemented with recent serological studies.
Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a chronic disease that often results in multiple complications. Risk prediction and profiling of T2DM complications is critical for healthcare professionals to design personalized treatment plans for patients in diabetes care for improved outcomes. In this paper, we study the risk of developing complications after the initial T2DM diagnosis from longitudinal patient records. We propose a novel multi-task learning approach to simultaneously model multiple complications where each task corresponds to the risk modeling of one complication. Specifically, the proposed method strategically captures the relationships (1) between the risks of multiple T2DM complications, (2) between the different risk factors, and (3) between the risk factor selection patterns. The method uses coefficient shrinkage to identify an informative subset of risk factors from high-dimensional data, and uses a hierarchical Bayesian framework to allow domain knowledge to be incorporated as priors. The proposed method is favorable for healthcare applications because in additional to improved prediction performance, relationships among the different risks and risk factors are also identified. Extensive experimental results on a large electronic medical claims database show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models by a significant margin. Furthermore, we show that the risk associations learned and the risk factors identified lead to meaningful clinical insights.