New studies reveal that potential COVID vaccine health risks, including kidney injury and respiratory infections, but experts urge caution in interpreting findings.

Background: Vancomycin, a key antibiotic for severe Gram-positive infections in ICUs, poses a high nephrotoxicity risk. Early prediction of kidney injury in critically ill patients is challenging. This study aimed to develop a machine learning model to predict vancomycin-related creatinine elevation using routine ICU data. Methods: We analyzed 10,288 ICU patients (aged 18-80) from the MIMIC-IV database who received vancomycin. Kidney injury was defined by KDIGO criteria (creatinine rise >=0.3 mg/dL within 48h or >=50% within 7d). Features were selected via SelectKBest (top 30) and Random Forest ranking (final 15). Six algorithms were tested with 5-fold cross-validation. Interpretability was evaluated using SHAP, Accumulated Local Effects (ALE), and Bayesian posterior sampling. Results: Of 10,288 patients, 2,903 (28.2%) developed creatinine elevation. CatBoost performed best (AUROC 0.818 [95% CI: 0.801-0.834], sensitivity 0.800, specificity 0.681, negative predictive value 0.900). Key predictors were phosphate, total bilirubin, magnesium, Charlson index, and APSIII. SHAP confirmed phosphate as a major risk factor. ALE showed dose-response patterns. Bayesian analysis estimated mean risk 60.5% (95% credible interval: 16.8-89.4%) in high-risk cases. Conclusions: This machine learning model predicts vancomycin-associated creatinine elevation from routine ICU data with strong accuracy and interpretability, enabling early risk detection and supporting timely interventions in critical care.

Background: Hypertensive kidney disease (HKD) patients in intensive care units (ICUs) face high short-term mortality, but tailored risk prediction tools are lacking. Early identification of high-risk individuals is crucial for clinical decision-making. Methods: We developed a machine learning framework to predict 30-day in-hospital mortality among ICU patients with HKD using early clinical data from the MIMIC-IV v2.2 database. A cohort of 1,366 adults was curated with strict criteria, excluding malignancy cases. Eighteen clinical features-including vital signs, labs, comorbidities, and therapies-were selected via random forest importance and mutual information filtering. Several models were trained and compared with stratified five-fold cross-validation; CatBoost demonstrated the best performance. Results: CatBoost achieved an AUROC of 0.88 on the independent test set, with sensitivity of 0.811 and specificity of 0.798. SHAP values and Accumulated Local Effects (ALE) plots showed the model relied on meaningful predictors such as altered consciousness, vasopressor use, and coagulation status. Additionally, the DREAM algorithm was integrated to estimate patient-specific posterior risk distributions, allowing clinicians to assess both predicted mortality and its uncertainty. Conclusions: We present an interpretable machine learning pipeline for early, real-time risk assessment in ICU patients with HKD. By combining high predictive performance with uncertainty quantification, our model supports individualized triage and transparent clinical decisions. This approach shows promise for clinical deployment and merits external validation in broader critical care populations.

Traditional methods of surgical decision making heavily rely on human experience and prompt actions, which are variable. A data-driven system generating treatment recommendations based on patient states can be a substantial asset in perioperative decision-making, as in cases of intraoperative hypotension, for which suboptimal management is associated with acute kidney injury (AKI), a common and morbid postoperative complication. We developed a Reinforcement Learning (RL) model to recommend optimum dose of intravenous (IV) fluid and vasopressors during surgery to avoid intraoperative hypotension and postoperative AKI. We retrospectively analyzed 50,021 surgeries from 42,547 adult patients who underwent major surgery at a quaternary care hospital between June 2014 and September 2020. Of these, 34,186 surgeries were used for model training and 15,835 surgeries were reserved for testing. We developed a Deep Q-Networks based RL model using 16 variables including intraoperative physiologic time series, total dose of IV fluid and vasopressors extracted for every 15-minute epoch. The model replicated 69% of physician's decisions for the dosage of vasopressors and proposed higher or lower dosage of vasopressors than received in 10% and 21% of the treatments, respectively. In terms of IV fluids, the model's recommendations were within 0.05 ml/kg/15 min of the actual dose in 41% of the cases, with higher or lower doses recommended for 27% and 32% of the treatments, respectively. The model resulted in a higher estimated policy value compared to the physicians' actual treatments, as well as random and zero-drug policies. AKI prevalence was the lowest in patients receiving medication dosages that aligned with model's decisions. Our findings suggest that implementation of the model's policy has the potential to reduce postoperative AKI and improve other outcomes driven by intraoperative hypotension.

Background: Sepsis-Associated Acute Kidney Injury (SA-AKI) leads to high mortality in intensive care. This study develops machine learning models using the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV (MIMIC-IV) database to predict Intensive Care Unit (ICU) mortality in SA-AKI patients. External validation is conducted using the eICU Collaborative Research Database. Methods: For 9,474 identified SA-AKI patients in MIMIC-IV, key features like lab results, vital signs, and comorbidities were selected using Variance Inflation Factor (VIF), Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), and expert input, narrowing to 24 predictive variables. An Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model was built for in-hospital mortality prediction, with hyperparameters optimized using GridSearch. Model interpretability was enhanced with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME). External validation was conducted using the eICU database. Results: The proposed XGBoost model achieved an internal Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.878 (95% Confidence Interval: 0.859-0.897). SHAP identified Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA), serum lactate, and respiratory rate as key mortality predictors. LIME highlighted serum lactate, Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II (APACHE II) score, total urine output, and serum calcium as critical features. Conclusions: The integration of advanced techniques with the XGBoost algorithm yielded a highly accurate and interpretable model for predicting SA-AKI mortality across diverse populations. It supports early identification of high-risk patients, enhancing clinical decision-making in intensive care. Future work needs to focus on enhancing adaptability, versatility, and real-world applications.

Background: Acute kidney injury (AKI), the decline of kidney excretory function, occurs in up to 18% of hospitalized admissions. Progression of AKI may lead to irreversible kidney damage. Methods: This retrospective cohort study includes adult patients admitted to a non-intensive care unit at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) (n = 46,815) and University of Florida Health (UFH) (n = 127,202). We developed and compared deep learning and conventional machine learning models to predict progression to Stage 2 or higher AKI within the next 48 hours. We trained local models for each site (UFH Model trained on UFH, UPMC Model trained on UPMC) and a separate model with a development cohort of patients from both sites (UFH-UPMC Model). We internally and externally validated the models on each site and performed subgroup analyses across sex and race. Results: Stage 2 or higher AKI occurred in 3% (n=3,257) and 8% (n=2,296) of UFH and UPMC patients, respectively. Area under the receiver operating curve values (AUROC) for the UFH test cohort ranged between 0.77 (UPMC Model) and 0.81 (UFH Model), while AUROC values ranged between 0.79 (UFH Model) and 0.83 (UPMC Model) for the UPMC test cohort. UFH-UPMC Model achieved an AUROC of 0.81 (95% confidence interval [CI] [0.80, 0.83]) for UFH and 0.82 (95% CI [0.81,0.84]) for UPMC test cohorts; an area under the precision recall curve values (AUPRC) of 0.6 (95% CI, [0.05, 0.06]) for UFH and 0.13 (95% CI, [0.11,0.15]) for UPMC test cohorts. Kinetic estimated glomerular filtration rate, nephrotoxic drug burden and blood urea nitrogen remained the top three features with the highest influence across the models and health centers. Conclusion: Locally developed models displayed marginally reduced discrimination when tested on another institution, while the top set of influencing features remained the same across the models and sites.

Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) is a frequent complication in critically ill patients, affecting up to 50% of patients in the intensive care units. The lack of standardized and open-source tools for applying the Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) criteria to time series data has a negative impact on workload and study quality. This project introduces pyAKI, an open-source pipeline addressing this gap by providing a comprehensive solution for consistent KDIGO criteria implementation. The pyAKI pipeline was developed and validated using a subset of the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC)-IV database, a commonly used database in critical care research. We defined a standardized data model in order to ensure reproducibility. Validation against expert annotations demonstrated pyAKI's robust performance in implementing KDIGO criteria. Comparative analysis revealed its ability to surpass the quality of human labels. This work introduces pyAKI as an open-source solution for implementing the KDIGO criteria for AKI diagnosis using time series data with high accuracy and performance.

Several algorithms for learning the structure of dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) require an a priori ordering of variables, which influences the determined graph topology. However, it is often unclear how to determine this order if feature importance is unknown, especially as an exhaustive search is usually impractical. In this paper, we introduce Ranking Approaches for Unknown Structures (RAUS), an automated framework to systematically inform variable ordering and learn networks end-to-end. RAUS leverages existing statistical methods (Cramers V, chi-squared test, and information gain) to compare variable ordering, resultant generated network topologies, and DBN performance. RAUS enables end-users with limited DBN expertise to implement models via command line interface. We evaluate RAUS on the task of predicting impending acute kidney injury (AKI) from inpatient clinical laboratory data. Longitudinal observations from 67,460 patients were collected from our electronic health record (EHR) and Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) criteria were then applied to define AKI events. RAUS learns multiple DBNs simultaneously to predict a future AKI event at different time points (i.e., 24-, 48-, 72-hours in advance of AKI). We also compared the results of the learned AKI prediction models and variable orderings to baseline techniques (logistic regression, random forests, and extreme gradient boosting). The DBNs generated by RAUS achieved 73-83% area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCROC) within 24-hours before AKI; and 71-79% AUCROC within 48-hours before AKI of any stage in a 7-day observation window. Insights from this automated framework can help efficiently implement and interpret DBNs for clinical decision support. The source code for RAUS is available in GitHub at https://github.com/dgrdn08/RAUS .

A New cross-domain strategy based XAI models for fake news detection v0.1.1 ABSTRACT The Advancement in technology and rapid usage of social media has made communication easier and faster than ever before. Fake news threatens the community, democracy, egalitarianism and people's trust. Cross-domain text classification is a task of a model adopting a target domain by using the knowledge of the source domain. Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning models are used to identify misleading information. Explainability is crucial in understanding the behaviour of these complex models. In this study, we propose a four-level cross-domain strategy to study the impact of explainability on cross-domain models. The latest findings in the natural language process, the "Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers" (BERT) model published by Devlin et al. (2018) google used to implement the concept of transfer learning. A fine-tune BERT model is used to perform cross-domain classification. Using this model, we conducted four experiments using datasets from different domains. Explanatory models like Anchor, ELI5, LIME and SHAP are used to design a novel explainable approach to cross-domain levels. The experimental analysis has given an ideal pair of XAI models on different levels of cross-domain. INTRODUCTION Nowadays, social media has become a potential influencing tool. According to the statistics published by Datareportal in July 2022, there is exponential growth in social media platforms, declaring that more than half of the world's population (59 per cent) is using them. Consequently, these platforms have deterministic effects on people's lives and the integrity of societies and local communities. Groups of people forming social media clusters use, unfortunately, these tools to spread speculation - so-called "fake news". In 2008, a journalist posted a report about Steve jobs medical condition. It has created massive confusion and controversy within societies and led to fluctuations in the stock price of Apple Inc. Rubin (2017). During the Covid-19 pandemic, fake news was largely spread among people and has created panic within societies. Recent statistics published by the United States support receiving reports from 80 per cent of consumers about the fake news outbreak. Insufficient data is one of the reasons behind unreliable communication, making it difficult to distinguish fake from real news. In 2016, fake news was popular mainly during the United States elections. They have created a great source of influence on people's opinions about two constants.

The study was a page-turner: Researchers at Google showed that an artificial intelligence system could predict acute kidney injury, a common killer of hospitalized patients, up to 48 hours in advance. The results were so promising that the Department of Veterans Affairs, which supplied de-identified patient data to help build the AI, said in 2019 that it would immediately start work to bring it to the bedside. But a new study shows how treacherous that journey can be. Researchers found that a replica of the AI system, trained on a predominantly male population of veterans, does not perform nearly as well on women. Their study, published recently in the journal Nature, reports that a model built to approximate Google's AI overestimated the risk for women in certain circumstances and was less accurate in predicting the condition for women overall. "If we have this problem, then half the population won't benefit," said Jie Cao, a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan and the lead author of the paper.