Prediction of future healthcare expenses of patients from chest radiographs using deep learning: a pilot study.

Abstract

Our objective was to develop deep learning models with chest radiograph data to predict healthcare costs and classify top-50% spenders. 21,872 frontal chest radiographs were retrospectively collected from 19,524 patients with at least 1-year spending data. Among the patients, 11,003 patients had 3years of cost data, and 1678 patients had 5years of cost data. Model performances were measured with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC) for classification of top-50% spenders and Spearman rho for prediction of healthcare cost. The best model predicting 1-year (N=21,872) expenditure achieved ROC-AUC of 0.806 [95% CI 0.793-0.819] for top-50% spender classification and rho of 0.561 [0.536-0.586] for regression. Similarly, for predicting 3-year (N=12,395) expenditure, ROC-AUC of 0.771 [0.750-0.794] and rho of 0.524 [0.489-0.559]; for predicting 5-year (N=1779) expenditure ROC-AUC of 0.729 [0.667-0.729] and rho of 0.424 [0.324-0.529]. Our deep learning model demonstrated the feasibility of predicting health care expenditure as well as classifying top 50% healthcare spenders at 1, 3, and 5year(s), implying the feasibility of combining deep learning with information-rich imaging data to uncover hidden associations that may allude to physicians. Such a model can be a starting point of making an accurate budget in reimbursement models in healthcare industries.

View details for DOI 10.1038/s41598-022-12551-4

View details for PubMedID 35585177