Early Warning Index for Patient Deteriorations in Hospitals

Hospitals lack automated systems to harness the growing volume of heterogeneous clinical and operational data to effectively forecast critical events. Early identification of patients at risk for deterioration is essential not only for patient care quality monitoring but also for physician care management. However, translating varied data streams into accurate and interpretable risk assessments poses significant challenges due to inconsistent data formats. We develop a multimodal machine learning framework, the Early Warning Index (EWI), to predict the aggregate risk of ICU admission, emergency response team dispatch, and mortality. Key to EWI's design is a human-in-the-loop process: clinicians help determine alert thresholds and interpret model outputs, which are enhanced by explainable outputs using Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to highlight clinical and operational factors (e.g., scheduled surgeries, ward census) driving each patient's risk. We deploy EWI in a hospital dashboard that stratifies patients into three risk tiers. Using a dataset of 18,633 unique patients at a large U.S. hospital, our approach automatically extracts features from both structured and unstructured electronic health record (EHR) data and achieves C-statistics of 0.796. It is currently used as a triage tool for proactively managing at-risk patients. The proposed approach saves physicians valuable time by automatically sorting patients of varying risk levels, allowing them to concentrate on patient care rather than sifting through complex EHR data. By further pinpointing specific risk drivers, the proposed model provides data-informed adjustments to caregiver scheduling and allocation of critical resources. As a result, clinicians and administrators can avert downstream complications, including costly procedures or high readmission rates and improve overall patient flow.

Towards Optimal Valve Prescription for Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) Surgery: A Machine Learning Approach

Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) has emerged as a minimally invasive treatment option for patients with severe aortic stenosis, a life-threatening cardiovascular condition. Multiple transcatheter heart valves (THV) have been approved for use in TAVR, but current guidelines regarding valve type prescription remain an active topic of debate. We propose a data-driven clinical support tool to identify the optimal valve type with the objective of minimizing the risk of permanent pacemaker implantation (PPI), a predominant postoperative complication. We synthesize a novel dataset that combines U.S. and Greek patient populations and integrates three distinct data sources (patient demographics, computed tomography scans, echocardiograms) while harmonizing differences in each country's record system. We introduce a leaf-level analysis to leverage population heterogeneity and avoid benchmarking against uncertain counterfactual risk estimates. The final prescriptive model shows a reduction in PPI rates of 26% and 16% compared with the current standard of care in our internal U.S. population and external Greek validation cohort, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first unified, personalized prescription strategy for THV selection in TAVR.