Predicting graft survival in paediatric kidney transplant recipients using machine learning

Abstract

Identification of factors that affect graft survival in kidney transplantation can increase graft survival and reduce mortality. Artificial intelligence modelling enables an impartial evaluation of clinician bias. The objective of this study is to examine the factors that affect the survival of grafts in paediatric kidney transplantation through the use of machine learning. Methods A retrospective review was conducted on records of paediatric patients who underwent kidney transplantation between 1994 and 2021 and had a post-transplant follow-up of more than 12 months. The nearest neighbour method was used to impute missing fields from a total of 48 variables in the dataset. Models including Naive Bayes, logistic regression, support vector machine (SVM), multi-layer perceptron and XGBoost were trained to predict graft survival. The study used 80% of the patients for training and the remaining 20% for testing. The modelling's success was evaluated based on the accuracy and F1 score metrics. Results The study analysed 465 kidney transplant recipients. Of these, 56.7% were male. The mean age at transplantation was 12.08 ± 5.01 years. Of the kidney transplants, 73.1% (n = 339) were from living donors, 34.5% (n = 160) were pre-emptive transplants, and 2.2% (n = 10) were second-time transplants. The machine learning model identified several features associated with graft survival, including antibody-mediated rejection (+ 0.7), acute cellular rejection (+ 0.66), eGFR at 3 years (+ 0.43), eGFR at 5 years (+ 0.34), pre-transplant peritoneal dialysis (+ 0.2), and cadaveric donor (+ 0.2). The successes of the logistic regression and SVM models was similar. The F1 score was 91.9%, and the accuracy was 96.5%. Discussion Machine learning can be used to identify factors that affect graft survival in kidney transplant recipients. By expanding similar studies, risk maps can be created prior to transplantation.