Standalone LLM and a Pre-specified Agentic Pipeline for Explaining ICU Mortality Predictions: a Feasibility Study on the eICU Demo Dataset

arXiv:2608.26109v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learning models can predict ICU mortality accurately, but feature-attribution methods alone rarely provide the clinical narrative needed for bedside use. Large language models (LLMs) may bridge this gap, and multi-step agentic pipelines are a plausible extension because they separate data interpretation, guideline checking, and final explanation. This revised feasibility study preserves the original standalone-versus-agentic comparison while making the main clinical findings more explicit. Using the retained local eICU Demo artifact set (2,353 ICU stays; 8.1\% mortality), XGBoost achieved an AUROC of 0.855 (95\% CI 0.796--0.906) and an AUPRC of 0.332 (95\% CI 0.217--0.494). On a stratified 38-case explanation subset, the standalone LLM produced 1 explanation with explicit outcome leakage, whereas the four-step agentic pipeline produced none. Among the 14 cases that overlapped with the SHAP review subset, the standalone LLM showed higher SHAP alignment (mean Jaccard 0.171 versus 0.077) and higher direction consistency (92.9\% versus 78.6\%), while the agentic pipeline showed higher guideline grounding (0.762 versus 0.143), higher value specificity (0.236 versus 0.143), and slightly higher plausibility (0.700 versus 0.671). Clinically, the results suggest that agentic decomposition may improve safety-relevant grounding and patient-specific detail, but it should be paired with attribution-based checks before use in high-stakes risk explanation.