Integrating Multi-Modal Imaging Features for Early Prediction of Acute Kidney Injury in Pneumonia Sepsis: A Multicenter Retrospective Study.

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Abstract

Sepsis, a severe complication of infection, often leads to acute kidney injury (AKI), which significantly increases the risk of death. Despite its clinical importance, early prediction of AKI remains challenging. Current tools rely on blood and urine tests, which are costly, variable, and not always available in time for intervention. Pneumonia is the most common cause of sepsis, accounting for over one-third of cases. In such patients, pulmonary inflammation and perilesional tissue alterations may serve as surrogate markers of systemic disease progression. However, these imaging features are rarely used in clinical decision-making. To overcome this limitation, our study aims to extract informative imaging features from pneumonia-associated sepsis cases using deep learning, with the goal of predicting the development of AKI. This dual-center retrospective study included pneumonia-associated sepsis patients (Jan 2020-Jul 2024). Chest CT images, clinical records, and laboratory data at admission were collected. We propose MCANet (Multimodal Cross-Attention Network), a two-stage deep learning framework designed to predict the occurrence of pneumonia-associated sepsis-related acute kidney injury (pSA-AKI). In the first stage, region-specific features were extracted from the lungs, epicardial adipose tissue, and T4-level subcutaneous adipose tissue using ResNet-18, which was chosen for its lightweight architecture and efficiency in processing multi-regional 2D CT slices with low computational cost. In the second stage, the extracted features were fused via a Multiscale Feature Attention Network (MSFAN) employing cross-attention mechanisms to enhance interactions among anatomical regions, followed by classification using ResNet-101, selected for its deeper architecture and strong ability to model global semantic representations and complex patterns.Model performance was evaluated using AUC, accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Grad-CAM and PyRadiomics were employed for visual interpretation and radiomic analysis, respectively. A total of 399 patients with pneumonia-associated sepsis were included in this study. The modality ablation experiments demonstrated that the model integrating features from the lungs, T4-level subcutaneous adipose tissue, and epicardial adipose tissue achieved the best performance, with an accuracy of 0.981 and an AUC of 0.99 on the external test set from an independent center. For the prediction of AKI onset time, the LightGBM model incorporating imaging and clinical features achieved the highest accuracy of 0.8409 on the external test set. Furthermore, the multimodal model combining deep features, radiomics features, and clinical data further improved predictive performance, reaching an accuracy of 0.9773 and an AUC of 0.961 on the external test set. This study developed MCAnet, a multimodal deep learning framework that integrates imaging features from the lungs, epicardial adipose tissue, and T4-level subcutaneous adipose tissue. The framework significantly improved the accuracy of AKI occurrence and temporal prediction in pneumonia-associated sepsis patients, highlighting the synergistic role of adipose tissue and lung characteristics. Furthermore, explainability analysis revealed potential decision-making mechanisms underlying the temporal progression of pSA-AKI, offering new insights for clinical management.

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