Development and External Validation of a High-Precision Model for Predicting ICU Admission from Emergency Department Triage

ObjectiveTo develop, internally evaluate, and externally validate a machine-learning (ML) model predicting intensive care unit (ICU) admission or death using information available solely at emergency department (ED) triage. Performance was primarily assessed by area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) to address severe class imbalance. MethodsWe trained an XGBoost classifier on the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV (MIMIC-IV) dataset. Positive outcomes were ICU admission or death within 6 hours of arrival. Features included vital signs, engineered physiological measures, clinician-assigned acuity, demographics, chief complaint, and home medications. Model performance was internally evaluated through group-stratified five-fold cross-validation and externally validated on the Multimodal Clinical Monitoring in the Emergency Department (MC-MED) dataset. ResultsIn the internal validation (MIMIC-IV, 350,241 visits; 11,745 ICU/death), the model achieved an AUPRC of 0.736 (95% CI: 0.728-0.743), AUROC of 0.966 (95% CI: 0.965-0.968), and accuracy of 0.936 (95% CI: 0.936-0.938). On external validation (MC-MED, 42,624 visits; 1,503 ICU/death), the model retained robust performance with an AUPRC of 0.602 (95% CI: 0.578-0.624, 0.134 decrease), AUROC of 0.949 (95% CI: 0.944-0.955, 0.017 decrease), and accuracy of 0.928 (95% CI: 0.927-0.932, 0.007 decrease), demonstrating promising generalizability despite institutional, temporal, and patient demographic differences. ConclusionsThis study presents one of the first triage ML models externally validated on a distinct ED cohort, achieving a new benchmark for AUPRC in flagging critically ill patients within minutes. Future directions include multi-site training and validation to further enhance real-world generalizability and clinical applicability.