Drug-Associated Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) in the ICU

KDIGO-Based Phenotyping & Predictive Modeling using MIMIC-IV

This project builds an end-to-end clinical machine learning pipeline to study and predict drug-associated acute kidney injury (AKI) in critically ill adults using MIMIC-IV v3.1. The goal is early AKI risk detection following exposure to nephrotoxic medications, with a strong emphasis on clinical validity and interpretability.

Using gold-standard KDIGO 2012 AKI definitions (serum creatinine + urine output), I construct a reproducible ICU cohort, identify drug exposure windows, engineer temporal features from pre-drug data, and train CatBoost models to predict 48-hour AKI risk.

Key Highlights

  • Analyzed 65,000+ ICU stays from MIMIC-IV
  • Implemented full KDIGO 2012 AKI phenotyping (SCr + urine output)
  • Modeled AKI risk after nephrotoxic drugs (e.g., vancomycin, NSAIDs, ACE/ARBs)
  • Engineered temporal features from labs, vitals, urine output, and severity scores
  • Improved early AKI detection with ROC-AUC ~0.85 and nearly doubled recall
  • Used SHAP explainability to validate clinical plausibility and risk drivers

Why This Project Matters

  • Addresses a high-impact patient safety problem in the ICU
  • Uses guideline-based labels, not weak proxies
  • Balances performance, recall, and interpretability
  • Designed for decision support, not just benchmark accuracy

Key Results (High-Level)

ModelROC-AUCPR-AUCRecall @ 0.50Notes
Baseline~0.82~0.15~0.37Static features only
Enriched~0.85~0.19~0.77Temporal + severity features

Takeaway:

Temporal labs, vitals, urine output and SOFA/SAPS-II nearly double recall while maintaining precision, a crucial improvement for early nephrotoxin risk prediction in ICU settings.