Predicting invasive mechanical ventilation in COVID 19 patients: A validation study

Introduction: The decision to intubate and ventilate a patient is mainly clinical. Both delaying intubation (when needed) and unnecessarily invasively ventilating (when it can be avoided) are harmful. We recently developed an algorithm predicting respiratory failure and invasive mechanical ventilation in COVID-19 patients. This is an internal validation study of this model, which also suggests a categorized “time-weighted” model. Methods: We used a dataset of COVID-19 patients who were admitted to Rabin Medical Center after the algorithm was developed. We evaluated model performance in predicting ventilation, regarding the actual endpoint of each patient. We further categorized each patient into one of four categories, based on the strength of the prediction of ventilation over time. We evaluated this categorized model performance regarding the actual endpoint of each patient. Results: 881 patients were included in the study; 96 of them were ventilated. AUC of the original algorithm is 0.87–0.94. The AUC of the categorized model is 0.95. Conclusions: A minor degradation in the algorithm accuracy was noted in the internal validation, however, its accuracy remained high. The categorized model allows accurate prediction over time, with very high negative predictive value.