Prediction of ICU admission for COVID-19 patients: A machine learning approach based on complete blood count data

In this article we discuss the development of prognostic Machine Learning (ML) models for COVID-19 progression: specifically, we address the task of predicting intensive care unit (ICU) admission in the next 5 days. We developed three ML models on the basis of 4995 Complete Blood Count (CBC) tests. We propose three ML models that differ in terms of interpretability: two fully interpretable models and a black-box one. We report an AUC of. 81 and. 83 for the interpretable models (the decision tree and logistic regression, respectively), and an AUC of. 88 for the black-box model (an ensemble). This shows that CBC data and ML methods can be used for cost-effective prediction of ICU admission of COVID-19 patients: in particular, as the CBC can be acquired rapidly through routine blood exams, our models could also be applied in resource-limited settings and to get fast indications at triage and daily rounds.