Patient and Data Collection
LTVA, coma, acute heart failure, diabetes
MYOCARDIAL INFARCTION, VENTRICULAR FIBRILLATION, COMA, HYPERTENSION, SUSTAINED VENTRICULAR TACHYCARDIA, ACUTE HEART FAILURE, DIABETES
Patients with LTVA in the hospital were included in this study. LTVAs were defined as documented sustained ventricular tachycardia (duration >30 seconds) or ventricular fibrillation. Patients aged <18 years or without adequate data, including demographic variables (eg, age, sex) and hospitalization details (eg, time of stay in the ICU, in-hospital mortality), were excluded. The data were collected from the database using Structure Query Language (PostgreSQL version 13.0). The variables included in this study could be divided into several categories: (1) demographics, including age, sex, race, height, and weight; (2) vital signs, including temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, Glasgow coma scale (GCS), and urine output; (3) blood gas test, including pH, partial pressure of oxygen, partial pressure of carbon dioxide, and other parameters; (4) laboratory results, including white blood cell count, red blood cell count (RBC), creatinine, blood urea nitrogen, and other parameters; (5) comorbidities, including hypertension, diabetes, acute heart failure, myocardial infarction, and others; and (6) important interventions, including mechanical ventilation, renal replacement therapy, inotropic agents, and antibiotics. For variables with several records (eg, vital signs and laboratory tests), the minimum and maximum values within the first 24 hours after ICU admission were calculated, which may reflect the truly general conditions of the patients admitted to the ICU.Several methods were introduced to handle the issues of extreme and missing data. Variables with >40% missing values were excluded from this study. Mean imputation was performed to fill in missing information for variables with <5% missing data. The multiple imputation was performed using the R multivariate imputation by chained equation (MICE) package for the variables with 5%-40% missing data [