The study was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee of Yulin First Hospital, Shaanxi Province, China. Because this was a retrospective analysis of routinely collected hospital data, and because all data were anonymized before analysis, the requirement for written informed consent was waived. The study was conducted in accordance with institutional data-protection requirements and the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki.
Data and Methods
Study Population and Design
This was a retrospective single-center cohort study conducted at Yulin First Hospital, Shaanxi Province, China. The hospital records of patients admitted with aSAH between July 2022 and December 2024 were screened. Eligible patients were adults aged 18 years or older with a diagnosis of aSAH confirmed by cranial and intracranial vascular imaging. Patients were required to have been admitted within 72 h after symptom onset and to have undergone aneurysm treatment during the index hospitalization.
Patients were excluded if they had traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage, non-aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage, severe pre-existing hematological disease, other major intracranial disease affecting outcome assessment, insufficient records for DCI evaluation, or in-hospital death before an adequate DCI assessment period. Excluding early in-hospital deaths may introduce survivorship bias because the most severe cases may be removed from analysis. Therefore, the findings should be interpreted as applying mainly to patients who survived long enough for DCI evaluation.
Data Collection
Clinical, laboratory, imaging, and treatment-related variables were extracted from the electronic medical record using a predefined data-extraction form. The extracted variables included demographic factors, medical history, aneurysm features, early neurological grade, early imaging findings, laboratory results, treatment approach, and hospital complications. The intended prediction time point was after completion of the initial admission and perioperative assessment, but before the main DCI risk window.
Age, sex, body mass index, smoking status, alcohol use, hypertension, diabetes, aneurysm size, aneurysm location, modified Fisher grade, Hunt-Hess grade, World Federation of Neurological Surgeons grade, intraventricular hemorrhage, and rebleeding were taken from admission records and initial imaging. Laboratory variables, including hemoglobin, serum albumin, and serum sodium, were obtained from the earliest available blood test prior to the prediction time point. Cerebral edema was assessed using baseline or immediate post-treatment imaging available before DCI diagnosis. Variables recorded only after DCI onset were not used for model development to reduce information leakage.
Anemia was defined as hemoglobin <110 g/L in female patients and <120 g/L in male patients. Hypoalbuminemia was defined as serum albumin <35 g/L. Hyponatremia was defined as serum sodium <130 mmol/L.
Patients were managed according to the institutional aSAH care pathway. Standard management included early aneurysm securing, neurological observation, blood pressure control, fluid and electrolyte management, and surveillance for complications including hydrocephalus, rebleeding, seizure, infection, vasospasm, and DCI. Nimodipine was used unless contraindicated. Vasospasm monitoring was performed using neurological examination, vascular imaging, and transcranial Doppler ultrasonography when clinically indicated. Hydrocephalus was managed with cerebrospinal fluid diversion when required. Hemodynamic optimization and rescue therapy were applied according to the treating team’s assessment. Because treatment intensity and rescue-therapy details were not completely captured in the retrospective dataset, these factors could not be fully adjusted in the model and were considered a limitation.
Diagnosis of DCI
DCI was defined as a new focal neurological impairment, a decrease in level of consciousness, or a new cerebral infarction on follow-up computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging occurring during the expected DCI risk window and not explained by another cause. The DCI risk window was defined as days 3–14 after the hemorrhage ictus. Alternative explanations, including rebleeding, hydrocephalus, seizure, infection, metabolic disturbance, sedative effect, and procedure-related infarction, were reviewed before classifying an event as DCI.
Outcome adjudication was performed by two clinicians with experience in the management of aSAH, including one neurosurgeon and one neurologist/neurocritical care physician. The adjudicators reviewed clinical notes, neurological examinations, imaging reports, and follow-up imaging. They were blinded to the final model output during outcome assessment. Disagreements were resolved through consensus discussion with review of the relevant imaging and clinical timeline. Formal inter-rater agreement was not measured, and this limitation was added because DCI classification may involve clinical judgment.
Sample Size Calculation
The sample size was estimated using the 10-events-per-variable (EPV) rule of thumb11. With 20 candidate predictor variables and an expected DCI incidence of approximately 35%, a minimum sample size of 20 × 10 / 0.35 ≈ 572 patients was required. Our final cohort of 680 patients exceeded this requirement. Although the events-per-variable (EPV) rule was applied as a general guideline, modern predictive modeling, particularly machine learning algorithms, may require more flexible sample-size considerations. The final cohort size was considered adequate to ensure model stability, minimize the risk of overfitting, and enable reliable estimation of model performance metrics.
Model development and validation
Patients were allocated to a training cohort of 544 patients and a hold-out internal validation cohort of 136 patients using an outcome-stratified 8:2 split. Outcome stratification was used to maintain a similar proportion of DCI events in the two cohorts. DCI occurred in 175 of 544 patients in the training cohort and 42 of 136 patients in the internal-validation cohort. The 8:2 hold-out design was retained because it was the prespecified model-development strategy and provided a separate cohort for preliminary internal performance assessment.
Predictor selection was performed only in the training cohort using least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression with 10-fold cross-validation. The selected penalty parameter was λ = 0.031. Six predictors were retained: age, cerebral edema, hypoalbuminemia, modified Fisher grade, Hunt-Hess grade, and World Federation of Neurological Surgeons grade.
Logistic regression, extreme gradient boosting, light gradient boosting machine, support vector machine, and k-nearest neighbor models were developed using the same set of selected predictors. All preprocessing, predictor selection, and model-development procedures were restricted to the training cohort. The internal-validation cohort was not used during predictor selection or model tuning and was evaluated only after model development.
The numerical random seed used for the original cohort allocation was not retained in the archived analysis records and could not be retrospectively verified. Bootstrap optimism correction and repeated k-fold internal validation were also not available. Therefore, the present analysis is described as a single hold-out internal validation rather than an optimism-corrected or repeated cross-validated performance assessment.
Machine-learning reproducibility
LASSO predictor selection used 10-fold cross-validation within the training cohort. Continuous predictors were standardized when required by the modeling algorithm, and categorical predictors were represented using predefined binary clinical categories. The validation cohort was not used for tuning or model selection.
The archived analysis materials did not retain the final tuning grids, selected hyperparameters, complete package versions, original random seed, or a confirmed class-imbalance procedure for XGBoost, LightGBM, SVM, and KNN. These settings were therefore not reconstructed or estimated. The machine-learning comparisons should consequently be interpreted as exploratory comparisons of algorithms rather than fully reproducible model-development experiments. Reproducibility information, both available and unavailable, should be summarized in Supplementary Table 1.
Bias Control & Sensitivity Analysis
Consecutive eligible patients were included to reduce selection bias. Standardized variable definitions and a structured data-extraction form were used to reduce information bias. Predictors were restricted to information available before the intended DCI prediction time point to reduce information leakage. Predictor selection, preprocessing, and model development were performed only in the training cohort.
Modified Fisher grade, Hunt-Hess grade, and WFNS grade represent related aspects of hemorrhage burden and neurological severity. Although all three variables were retained after LASSO selection, the numerical variance inflation factor values and the results from a sensitivity model excluding overlapping severity scales were not included in the archived analysis output. These analyses could not be reconstructed from the aggregate tables because patient-level correlations and fitted model outputs are required. Therefore, the individual coefficients of these severity measures were not interpreted as independent or causal effects. They were retained only as components of the prediction model selected in the training cohort.
Model Interpretability
Clinical applicability was believed to require model interpretability as a crucial element. In the most effective model, the effects of predictors were considered to assess the clinical plausibility and conformity with existing pathophysiological knowledge of delayed cerebral ischemia. This method enabled a clear assessment of model behavior and improved the potential for clinical translation.
Missing Data
Variable-level missingness was assessed during data preparation. However, the original pre-imputation missing counts and percentages for each candidate variable were not retained in the archived analysis records and could not be accurately reconstructed from the aggregate tables. Consequently, no assumption of complete data was made, and no unverified missingness percentages were reported.
A verified supplementary missing-data table should be generated directly from the original deidentified patient-level dataset. Supplementary Table 2 should report, for every candidate variable, the number and percentage of missing observations before data handling, the method used to address missingness, and the number of observations included in the final analysis. The inability to recover the original variable-specific missingness pattern was considered a limitation of the present report.
Statistical Analysis
Predictor selection was performed in the training cohort using LASSO regression with 10-fold cross-validation. Discrimination was assessed using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve with 95% confidence intervals. Calibration was described using calibration plots and point estimates of the calibration slope, calibration intercept, and Brier score. Bootstrap confidence intervals for calibration measures were not available.
Threshold-dependent classification measures were calculated from the available internal-validation confusion matrices. The exact numerical probability threshold used to generate the archived confusion matrices was not retained and could not be verified. Therefore, these measures were interpreted descriptively and were not used as the primary basis for model selection. Decision-curve analysis was also considered exploratory because the exact prespecified threshold range and patient-level net-benefit output were not retained. A two-sided P value below 0.05 was considered statistically significant.