Summary
Objectives: This paper addresses the problem of decision-making in relation to the administration
of noninvasive mechanical ventila tion (NIMV) in intensive care units.
Methods: Data mining methods were employed to find out the factors influencing the success/failure
of NIMV and to predict its results in future patients. These artificial intelligence-based
methods have not been applied in this field in spite of the good results obtained
in other medical areas.
Results: Feature selection methods provided the most influential variables in the success/
failure of NIMV, such as NIMV hours, PaCO2 at the start, PaO2 / FiO2 ratio at the start, hematocrit at the start or PaO2 / FiO2 ratio after two hours. These methods were also used in the preprocessing step with
the aim of improving the results of the classifiers. The algorithms provided the best
results when the dataset used as input was the one containing the attributes selected
with the CFS method. Conclusions: Data mining methods can be successfully applied to determine the most influential
factors in the success/failure of NIMV and also to predict NIMV results in future
patients. The results provided by classifiers can be improved by preprocessing the
data with feature selection techniques.
Keywords
Noninvasive ventilation - respiration disorders - respiratory insufficiency - data
mining - feature selection methods - classifiers - multi-classifiers