Optimizing Prehospital Stroke Diagnosis: Integrating Machine Learning with the FAST Scoring System

Strokes are a leading cause of disability and death worldwide, and timely diagnosis is critical for effective treatment. Prehospital stroke diagnosis by emergency medical services (EMS) is essential for ensuring prompt care. The FAST (Face, Arms, Speech, and Time) scoring system is a common tool used to identify stroke symptoms quickly. However, the traditional FAST system has limitations, including reliance on subjective assessments and potential misdiagnoses due to symptom variability. This study aims to optimize the FAST scoring system and compare its performance with various machine learning models to enhance stroke prediction accuracy. A dataset from an ambulance service, including prehospital data such as age, sex, and FAST test results, was used. Data preprocessing involved handling missing values, encoding categorical variables, and applying the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) to balance the dataset. A grid search was conducted to test different weighting schemes for the FAST system. Machine learning models, including Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM), XGBoost, and Decision Tree, were trained and evaluated using cross-validation on the training set and tested on a separate test set. The traditional FAST system showed an accuracy of 62.95%. Optimizing the FAST system through grid search marginally increased accuracy to 64.36%. However, machine learning models, particularly Random Forest, significantly outperformed the FAST system, achieving a test set accuracy of 88.54%. XGBoost also demonstrated strong performance with an accuracy of 77.07%, while Logistic Regression, SVM, and Decision Tree showed lower accuracies. These findings suggest that integrating machine learning models into EMS protocols could substantially improve the accuracy of prehospital stroke diagnosis, leading to quicker and more accurate identification and treatment of stroke patients. Although the optimized FAST system offers slight improvements, machine learning models present a promising avenue for enhancing stroke prediction and improving patient outcomes in emergency settings while acknowledging practicality issues.