MELD-Plus is a risk score to assess severity of chronic liver disease. The score includes nine variables as effective predictors for 90-day mortality after a discharge from a cirrhosis-related admission. The variables include all Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD)'s components, as well as sodium, albumin, total cholesterol, white blood cell count, age, and length of stay. MELD-Plus was created as a result of a collaboration between Massachusetts General Hospital and IBM.
The development of MELD-Plus was based on using unbiased approach toward discovery of biomarkers. In this approach, a feature selection machine learning algorithm observes a large collection of health records and identifies a small set of variables that could serve as the most efficient predictors for a given medical outcome. An example for a notable feature selection method is lasso (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator).
Video MELD-Plus
Criticism of machine learning in prediction modeling
Chen & Asch 2017 wrote: "With machine learning situated at the peak of inflated expectations, we can soften a subsequent crash into a "trough of disillusionment" by fostering a stronger appreciation of the technology's capabilities and limitations." However, the authors further added "Although predictive algorithms cannot eliminate medical uncertainty, they already improve allocation of scarce health care resources, helping to avert hospitalization for patients with low-risk pulmonary embolisms (PESI) and fairly prioritizing patients for liver transplantation by means of MELD scores."
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Source of article : Wikipedia