Predicting Asthma Attacks in Primary Care with Machine Learning

Study type

• Study type:
  Non-interventional study
• Scope of the study:
  Assessment of risk minimisation measure implementation or effectiveness

  Disease epidemiology

Non-interventional study

• Non-interventional study design:
  Cohort

Study drug and medical condition

• Medical condition to be studied:
  Asthma

Population studied

• Age groups:
  Children (2 to < 12 years)

  Adolescents (12 to < 18 years)

  Adults (18 to < 46 years)

  Adults (46 to < 65 years)

  Adults (65 to < 75 years)

  Adults (75 to < 85 years)

  Adults (85 years and over)
• Estimated number of subjects:
  100000

Study design details

• Main study objective:
  We aim to develop a prognostic tool for identifying patients at high risk of asthma attacks in primary care by leveraging advances in machine learning.
• Outcomes:
  Asthma Attacks
• Data analysis plan:
  We propose to apply various well-known machine learning techniques including deep learning to a large longitudinal deidentified primary care database, the Optimum Patient Care Research Database, and comparatively evaluate their performance with the existing logistic regression model and against each other. Machine learning algorithms vary in their predictive abilities based on the dataset and the approach to analysis employed. We will undertake feature selection, classification (both one-class and two-class classifiers) and performance evaluation. Patients who have had actively treated clinician diagnosed asthma, aged 8–80 years and with 3 years of continuous data, from 2016 to 2018, will be selected. Risk factors will be obtained from the first year, while the next 2 years will form the outcome period, in which the primary endpoint will be the occurrence of an asthma attack.