What question did this study set out to answer?

The aim is to predict the need for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) following psychiatric hospital admission.

February 14, 2026Acta Neuropsychiatrica1 citationsOpen Access

Predicting the need for electroconvulsive therapy via machine learning trained on electronic health record data

LHLasse HansenRoche (Switzerland)JDJakob Grøhn DamgaardAarhus University RLRobert M. LundinBarwon Health

Key Points

The aim is to predict the need for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) following psychiatric hospital admission.
Utilized electronic health record (EHR) data from a psychiatric hospital over an 8-year period.
Included adult patients admitted for severe mental illness but excluded those already planned for ECT.
Applied machine learning models, specifically extreme gradient boosting, to predict ECT initiation based on training and test sets.
The model demonstrated a high predictive capability with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.94.
Achieved 47% sensitivity and 98% specificity for predicting ECT initiation.
Identified the highest suicide assessment score and mean Brøset violence checklist score as top predictors for ECT need.

Abstract

Abstract Objectives: Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is an effective treatment of severe manifestations of mental illness. Since delay in initiation of ECT can have detrimental effects, prediction of the need for ECT could improve outcomes via more timely treatment initiation. Therefore, this study aimed to predict the need for ECT following admission to a psychiatric hospital. Methods: This study was based on electronic health record (EHR) data from routine clinical practice. Adult patients admitted to a hospital within the Psychiatric Services of the Central Denmark Region between January 2013 and November 2021 were included in the study. The outcome was initiation of ECT >7 days (to not include patients admitted for planned ECT) and ≤67 days after admission. The data was randomly split into an 85% training set and a 15% test set. On the 7 th day of the inpatient stay, machine learning models (extreme gradient boosting) were trained to predict initiation of ECT and subsequently tested on the test set. Results: The cohort consisted of 41,610 patients with 164,961 admissions. In the held out test set, the trained model predicted ECT initiation with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.94, 47% sensitivity, 98% specificity, positive predictive value of 24% and negative predictive value of 99%. The top predictors were the highest suicide assessment score and mean Brøset violence checklist score in the preceding three months. Conclusions: EHR data from routine clinical practice may be used to predict need for ECT. This may lead to more timely treatment initiation.

AI에게 질문

Bookmark

View Full Paper