Prediction of Serious Intracranial Hypertension from Low-Resolution Neuromonitoring in Traumatic Brain Injury: An Explainable Machine Learning Approach

There is a strong association between intracranial hypertension (IH) that occurs following the acute phase of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and negative outcomes. This study proposes a pressure–time dose (PTD)-based parameter that may specify a possible serious IH (SIH) event and develops a model to predict SIH. The minute-by-minute signals of arterial blood pressure (ABP) and intracranial pressure (ICP) of 117 TBI patients were utilized as the internal validation dataset. The SIH event was explored through the prognostic power of the IH event variables for the outcome after 6 months, and an IH event with thresholds that included an ICP of 20 mmHg and PTD > 130 mmHg * minutes was considered an SIH event. The physiological characteristics of normal, IH and SIH events were investigated. LightGBM was employed to forecast an SIH event from various time intervals using physiological parameters derived from the ABP and ICP. Training and validation were conducted on 1921 SIH events. External validation was performed on two multi-center datasets containing 26 and 382 SIH events. The SIH parameters could be used to predict mortality (AUROC = 0.893, p < 0.001) and favorability (AUROC = 0.858, p < 0.001). The trained model robustly forecasted SIH after 5 and 480 minutes with an accuracy of 86.95% and 72.18% in internal validation. External validation also revealed a similar performance. This study demonstrated that the proposed SIH prediction model has reasonable predictive capacities. A future intervention study is required to investigate whether the definition of SIH is maintained in multi-center data and to ensure the effects of the predictive system on TBI patient outcomes at the bedside.