AI Model Based on Diaphragm Ultrasound to Improve the Predictive Performance of Invasive Mechanical Ventilation Weaning: Prospective Cohort Study

Background: Point-of-care ultrasonography has become a valuable tool for assessing diaphragmatic function in critically ill patients receiving invasive mechanical ventilation. However, conventional diaphragm ultrasound assessment remains highly operator-dependent and subjective. Previous research introduced automatic measurement of diaphragmatic excursion and velocity using 2D speckle-tracking technology. Objective: This study aimed to develop an artificial intelligence-multimodal learning framework to improve the prediction of weaning failure and guide individualized weaning strategies. Methods: This prospective study enrolled critically ill patients older than 18 years who received mechanical ventilation for more than 48 hours and were eligible for a spontaneous breathing trial in 2 intensive care units in Guangzhou, China. Before the spontaneous breathing trial, diaphragm ultrasound videos were collected using a standardized protocol, and automatic measurements of excursion and velocity were obtained. A total of 88 patients were included, with 50 successfully weaned and 38 experiencing weaning failure. Each patient record included 27 clinical and 6 diaphragmatic indicators, selected based on previous literature and phenotyping studies. Clinical variables were preprocessed using OneHotEncoder, normalization, and scaling. Ultrasound videos were interpolated to a uniform resolution of 224×224×96. Artificial intelligence-multimodal learning based on clinical characteristics, laboratory parameters, and diaphragm ultrasonic videos was established. Four experiments were conducted in an ablation setting to evaluate model performance using different combinations of input data: (1) diaphragmatic excursion only, (2) clinical and diaphragmatic indicators, (3) ultrasound videos only, and (4) all modalities combined (multimodal). Metrics for evaluation included classification accuracy, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), average precision in the precision-recall curve, and calibration curve. Variable importance was assessed using SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanation) to interpret feature contributions and understand model predictions. Results: The multimodal co-learning model outperformed all single-modal approaches. The accuracy improved when predicted through diaphragm ultrasound video data using Video Vision Transformer (accuracy=0.8095, AUC=0.852), clinical or ultrasound indicators (accuracy=0.7381, AUC=0.746), and the multimodal co-learning (accuracy=0.8331, AUC=0.894). The proposed co-learning model achieved the highest score (average precision=0.91) among the 4 experiments. Furthermore, calibration curve analysis demonstrated that the proposed colearning model was well calibrated, as the curve was closest to the perfectly calibrated line. Conclusions: Combining ultrasound and clinical data for colearning improved the accuracy of the weaning outcome prediction. Multimodal learning based on automatic measurement of point-of-care ultrasonography and automated collection of objective clinical indicators greatly enhanced the practical operability and user-friendliness of the system. The proposed model offered promising potential for widespread clinical application in intensive care settings.

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