Using machine learning to determine the correlation between physiological and environmental parameters and the induction of acute mountain sickness

Abstract

Background: Recent studies on acute mountain sickness (AMS) have used fixed-location and fixed-time measurements of environmental and physiological variable to determine the influence of AMS-associated factors in the human body. This study aims to measure, in real time, environmental conditions and physiological variables of participants in high-altitude regions to develop an AMS risk evaluation model to forecast prospective development of AMS so its onset can be prevented.

Results: Thirty-two participants were recruited, namely 25 men and 7 women, and they hiked from Cuifeng Mountain Forest Park parking lot (altitude: 2300 m) to Wuling (altitude: 3275 m). Regression and classification machine learning analyses were performed on physiological and environmental data, and Lake Louise Acute Mountain Sickness Scores (LLS) to establish an algorithm for AMS risk analysis. The individual R² coefficients of determination between the LLS and the measured altitude, ambient temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, climbing speed, heart rate, blood oxygen saturation (SpO₂), heart rate variability (HRV), were 0.1, 0.23, 0, 0.24, 0, 0.24, 0.27, and 0.35 respectively; incorporating all aforementioned variables, the R² coefficient is 0.62. The bagged trees classifier achieved favorable classification results, yielding a model sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and area under receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.999, 0.994, 0.998, and 1, respectively.

Conclusion: The experiment results indicate the use of machine learning multivariate analysis have higher AMS prediction accuracies than analyses utilizing single varieties. The developed AMS evaluation model can serve as a reference for the future development of wearable devices capable of providing timely warnings of AMS risks to hikers.

Keywords: Acute mountain sickness; Blood oxygen saturation; Heart rate variability; Lake Louise acute mountain sickness score; Multivariate analysis; Physiological information.

Fig. 1

Area under the ROC curve for binary classifiers (Fine Tree, Cubic SVM, Weighted KNN, and Bagged Trees)

Fig. 2

The flowchart for pathogenesis and measurement methods of Acute Mountain Sickness. This figure simply illustrates the pathogenesis of acute mountain sickness. In mountainous areas over 2500 m above sea level, the human body responds to measurable physiological factors in order to adapt to the alpine hypoxia. The thick bordered boxes show acute mountain sickness pathogenesis, the thin bordered boxes are the respective method of measurement

Fig. 3

The map of the experimental route