Machine learning approach for pre-eclampsia risk factors association

Abstract

The preeclampsia/eclampsia syndrome is a multisystem disorder that usually includes cardiovascular changes, hematologic abnormalities, hepatic and renal impairment, and neurologic or cerebral manifestations. Preeclampsia (PE) is a clinical syndrome that afflicts 3–5% of pregnancies and it is a leading cause of maternal mortality, especially in developing countries. To understand in greater depth the preeclampsia/eclampsia syndrome, we applied some well-known Machine Learning (ML) techniques. ML has been successfully applied to medical research to improve the diagnosis and the prevention of complex diseases and syndromes. In our contribution, we have created a supervised model to predict if a patient suffers the disease. This model has been optimized by selecting the best features and by optimizing the threshold when predicting a class. We used these techniques to point out the most related features of the patients to the disease. Finally, we used interpretability techniques to extract and visualize through a decision tree the most relevant associations of the disease with the patients' features. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.