Predicting survival and neurological outcome in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest using machine learning: the SCARS modelResearch in context

Summary: Background: A prediction model that estimates survival and neurological outcome in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients has the potential to improve clinical management in emergency rooms. Methods: We used the Swedish Registry for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation to study all out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) cases in Sweden from 2010 to 2020. We had 393 candidate predictors describing the circumstances at cardiac arrest, critical time intervals, patient demographics, initial presentation, spatiotemporal data, socioeconomic status, medications, and comorbidities before arrest. To develop, evaluate and test an array of prediction models, we created stratified (on the outcome measure) random samples of our study population. We created a training set (60% of data), evaluation set (20% of data), and test set (20% of data).We assessed the 30-day survival and cerebral performance category (CPC) score at discharge using several machine learning frameworks with hyperparameter tuning. Parsimonious models with the top 1 to 20 strongest predictors were tested. We calibrated the decision threshold to assess the cut-off yielding 95% sensitivity for survival. The final model was deployed as a web application. Findings: We included 55,615 cases of OHCA. Initial presentation, prehospital interventions, and critical time intervals variables were the most important. At a sensitivity of 95%, specificity was 89%, positive predictive value 52%, and negative predictive value 99% in test data to predict 30-day survival. The area under the receiver characteristic curve was 0.97 in test data using all 393 predictors or only the ten most important predictors. The final model showed excellent calibration. The web application allowed for near-instantaneous survival calculations. Interpretation: Thirty-day survival and neurological outcome in OHCA can rapidly and reliably be estimated during ongoing cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the emergency room using a machine learning model incorporating widely available variables. Funding: Swedish Research Council (2019–02019); Swedish state under the agreement between the Swedish government, and the county councils (ALFGBG-971482); The Wallenberg Centre for Molecular and Translational Medicine.