Prediction of Prognostic Risk Factors in Patients with Invasive Candidiasis and Cancer: A Single-Centre Retrospective Study

Background: Invasive candidiasis is a common cancer-related complication with a high fatality rate. If patients with a high risk of dying in the hospital are identified early and accurately, physicians can make better clinical judgments. However, epidemiological analyses and mortality prediction models of cancer patients with invasive candidiasis remain limited.

Method: A set of 40 potential risk factors was acquired in a sample of 258 patients with both invasive candidiasis and cancer. To begin, risk factors for Candida albicans vs. non-Candida albicans infections and persistent vs. nonpersistent Candida infections were analysed using classic statistical methods. Then, we applied three machine learning models (random forest, logistic regression, and support vector machine) to identify prognostic indicators related to mortality. Prediction performance of different models was assessed by precision, recall, F1 score, accuracy, and AUC.

Results: Of the 258 patients both with invasive candidiasis and cancer included in the analysis. The median age of patients was 62 years, and 95 (36.82%) patients were older than 65 years, of which 178 (66.28%) were male. And 186 (72.1%) patients underwent surgery 2 weeks before data collection, 100 (39.1%) patients stayed in ICU during hospitalisation, 99 (38.4%) patients had bacterial blood infection, 85 (32.9%) patients had persistent invasive candidiasis, and 41 (15.9%) patients died within 30 days. The usage of drainage catheter and prolonged length of hospitalisation are the dominant risk factors for non-Candida albicans infections and persistent Candida infections, respectively. Risk factors, such as septic shock, history of surgery within the past 2 weeks, usage of drainage tubes, length of stay in ICU, total parenteral nutrition, serum creatinine level, fungal antigen, stay in ICU during hospitalisation, and total bilirubin level, were significant predictors of death. The RF model outperformed the LR and SVM models. Precision, recall, F1 score, accuracy, and AUC for RF were 64.29%, 75.63%, 69.23%, 89.61%, and 91.28%.

Conclusions: In this study, the machine learning-based models accurately predicted the prognosis of cancer and invasive candidiasis patients. The algorithm could be used to help clinicians in high-risk patients' early intervention.