February 10, 2023

New CHAIN Network research integrate machine learning to strengthen efforts to identify high-risk children during paediatric hospitalizations

New research from the Childhood Acute Illness and Nutrition Network (CHAIN) Network published in the Lancet’s discover series, eClinicalMedicine, applied machine learning algorithms to data collected on hospitalized children from six countries in sub Saharan Africa and Asia. The data showed that children with severe wasting, nutritional oedema, signs of sepsis, or evidence of renal insufficiency experienced extremely high rates of mortality. The authors concluded that developing novel interventions to treat these common comorbidities is a potentially important alternative to continued investment in incremental changes to the current WHO syndromic management approach. Click here to read the publication titled,  “Characterising paediatric mortality during and after acute illness in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia: a secondary analysis of the CHAIN cohort using a machine learning approach.”