AI-RiskX: An Explainable Deep Learning Approach for Identifying At-Risk Patients During Pandemics

Pandemics place extraordinary pressure on healthcare systems, particularly in identifying and prioritizing high-risk groups such as the elderly, pregnant women, and individuals with chronic diseases. Existing Artificial Intelligence models often fall short, focusing on single diseases, lacking interpretability, and overlooking patient-specific vulnerabilities. To address these gaps, we propose an Explainable Deep Learning approach for identifying at-risk patients during pandemics (AI-RiskX). AI-RiskX performs risk classification of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 or related infections to support timely intervention and resource allocation. Unlike previous models, AI-RiskX integrates five public datasets (asthma, diabetes, heart, kidney, and thyroid), employs the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) for class balancing, and uses a hybrid convolutional neural network–long short-term memory model (CNN–LSTM) for robust disease classification. SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) enables both individual and population-level interpretability, while a post-prediction rule-based module stratifies patients by age and pregnancy status. Achieving 98.78% accuracy, AI-RiskX offers a scalable, interpretable solution for equitable classification and decision support in public health emergencies.