COVID-Net Clinical ICU: Enhanced Prediction of ICU Admission for COVID-19 Patients via Explainability and Trust Quantification

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a devastating global impact, and has placed a tremendous burden on struggling healthcare systems around the world. Given the limited resources, accurate patient triaging and care planning is critical in the fight against COVID-19, and one crucial task within care planning is determining if a patient should be admitted to a hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU). Motivated by the need for transparent and trustworthy ICU admission clinical decision support, we introduce COVID-Net Clinical ICU, a neural network for ICU admission prediction based on patient clinical data. Driven by a transparent, trust-centric methodology, the proposed COVID-Net Clinical ICU was built using a clinical dataset from Hospital Sírio-Libanês comprising of 1,925 COVID-19 patients, and is able to predict when a COVID-19 positive patient would require ICU admission with an accuracy of 96.9% to facilitate better care planning for hospitals amidst the on-going pandemic. We conducted system-level insight discovery using a quantitative explainability strategy to study the decision-making impact of different clinical features and gain actionable insights for enhancing predictive performance. We further leveraged a suite of trust quantification metrics to gain deeper insights into the trustworthiness of COVID-Net Clinical ICU. By digging deeper into when and why clinical predictive models make certain decisions, we can uncover key factors in decision making for critical clinical decision support tasks such as ICU admission prediction and identify the situations under which clinical predictive models can be trusted for greater accountability.