Integrating Physiological Time Series and Clinical Notes with Transformer for Early Prediction of Sepsis

Sepsis is a leading cause of death in the Intensive Care Units (ICU). Early detection of sepsis is critical for patient survival. In this paper, we propose a multimodal Transformer model for early sepsis prediction, using the physiological time series data and clinical notes for each patient within $36$ hours of ICU admission. Specifically, we aim to predict sepsis using only the first 12, 18, 24, 30 and 36 hours of laboratory measurements, vital signs, patient demographics, and clinical notes. We evaluate our model on two large critical care datasets: MIMIC-III and eICU-CRD. The proposed method is compared with six baselines. In addition, ablation analysis and case studies are conducted to study the influence of each individual component of the model and the contribution of each data modality for early sepsis prediction. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms competitive baselines on all metrics.

Multiple Organ Failure Prediction with Classifier-Guided Generative Adversarial Imputation Networks

Multiple organ failure (MOF) is a severe syndrome with a high mortality rate among Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients. Early and precise detection is critical for clinicians to make timely decisions. An essential challenge in applying machine learning models to electronic health records (EHRs) is the pervasiveness of missing values. Most existing imputation methods are involved in the data preprocessing phase, failing to capture the relationship between data and outcome for downstream predictions. In this paper, we propose classifier-guided generative adversarial imputation networks Classifier-GAIN) for MOF prediction to bridge this gap, by incorporating both observed data and label information. Specifically, the classifier takes imputed values from the generator(imputer) to predict task outcomes and provides additional supervision signals to the generator by joint training. The classifier-guide generator imputes missing values with label-awareness during training, improving the classifier's performance during inference. We conduct extensive experiments showing that our approach consistently outperforms classical and state-of-art neural baselines across a range of missing data scenarios and evaluation metrics.

Empirical Analysis of Machine Learning Configurations for Prediction of Multiple Organ Failure in Trauma Patients

Multiple organ failure (MOF) is a life-threatening condition. Due to its urgency and high mortality rate, early detection is critical for clinicians to provide appropriate treatment. In this paper, we perform quantitative analysis on early MOF prediction with comprehensive machine learning (ML) configurations, including data preprocessing (missing value treatment, label balancing, feature scaling), feature selection, classifier choice, and hyperparameter tuning. Results show that classifier choice impacts both the performance improvement and variation most among all the configurations. In general, complex classifiers including ensemble methods can provide better performance than simple classifiers. However, blindly pursuing complex classifiers is unwise as it also brings the risk of greater performance variation.