Enhancing Cause of Death Prediction: Development and Validation of Machine Learning Models Using Multimodal Data Across Multiple Health-Care Sites

This multi-institutional retrospective study was conducted across Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and Massachusetts General Brigham (MGB), including deceased patients with encounters between October 1, 2015, and January 1, 2021, and confirmed death records. The cohort included 13,708 patients from VUMC and 34,839 from MGB. The primary outcome was underlying cause of death (CoD) categorized into the top 15 National Center for Health Statistics rankable causes, with others grouped as “Other.” Performance was assessed using weighted area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and F-measure.