Assessment of cardiovascular risk based on a data-driven knowledge discovery approach

The cardioRisk project addresses the development of personalized risk assessment tools for patients who have been admitted to the hospital with acute myocardial infarction. Although there are models available that assess the short-term risk of death/new events for such patients, these models were established in circumstances that do not take into account the present clinical interventions and, in some cases, the risk factors used by such models are not easily available in clinical practice. The integration of the existing risk tools (applied in the clinician´s daily practice) with data-driven knowledge discovery mechanisms based on data routinely collected during hospitalizations, will be a breakthrough in overcoming some of these difficulties. In this context, the development of simple and interpretable models (based on recent datasets), unquestionably will facilitate and will introduce confidence in this integration process. In this work, a simple and interpretable model based on a real dataset is proposed. It consists of a decision tree model structure that uses a reduced set of six binary risk factors. The validation is performed using a recent dataset provided by the Portuguese Society of Cardiology (11113 patients), which originally comprised 77 risk factors. A sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of, respectively, 80.42%, 77.25% and 78.80% were achieved showing the effectiveness of the approach.