Cross-site transportability of an explainable artificial intelligence model for acute kidney injury prediction

Artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated promise in predicting acute kidney injury (AKI), however, clinical adoption of these models requires interpretability and transportability. Non-interoperable data across hospitals is a major barrier to model transportability. Here, we leverage the US PCORnet platform to develop an AKI prediction model and assess its transportability across six independent health systems. Our work demonstrates that cross-site performance deterioration is likely and reveals heterogeneity of risk factors across populations to be the cause. Therefore, no matter how accurate an AI model is trained at the source hospital, whether it can be adopted at target hospitals is an unanswered question. To fill the research gap, we derive a method to predict the transportability of AI models which can accelerate the adaptation process of external AI models in hospitals.