AI Algorithm Shows Promise in Determining Intravenous Nutrition for Premature Babies

A Stanford Medicine study has shown that “artificial intelligence can improve intravenous nutrition for premature babies.”

The algorithm uses “information in preemies’ electronic medical records to predict which nutrients they need and in what quantities. The AI tool was trained on data from almost 80,000 past prescriptions for intravenous nutrition, which was linked to information about how the tiny patients fared.” Using AI to help prescribe IV nutrition could “reduce medical errors, save time and money, and make it easier to care for preemies in low-resource settings.”

As of now, standard practice is to come up with a TPN (total parenteral nutrition) prescription for each baby “from scratch.” It is the “single largest source of medical error in neonatal intensive care units.” It is also difficult to discern for doctors whether or not they’ve gotten the formula for each baby correct. Current prescriptions are based on factors such as “the baby’s weight, stage of development, and the results of their lab work.” Six experts are required to provide these prescriptions, and the process takes hours.

The AI algorithm used in this study was “trained on 10 years of electronic medical record data from the neonatal intensive care unit at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, including 79,790 prescriptions for IV nutrition from 5,913 premature patients. The algorithm also had access to information about patients’ medical outcomes, enabling it to find subtle patterns that connected nutrient levels to babies’ health.” The model was tested against 63,273 nutrition prescriptions from the University of California, San Francisco and it was “found that the model did a good job of predicting nutrient needs for this population, too.”

Next steps to implementation will include a “randomized clinical trial in which some patients receive nutrient prescriptions using the manual method, others receive AI-recommended prescriptions and the researchers see how each group fares.”