Data-driven Temporal Prediction of Surgical Site Infection

Analysis of data from Electronic Health Records (EHR) presents unique challenges, in particular regarding nonuniform temporal resolution of longitudinal variables. A considerable amount of patient information is available in the EHR - including blood tests that are performed routinely during inpatient follow-up. These data are useful for the design of advanced machine learning-based methods and prediction models. Using a matched cohort of patients undergoing gastrointestinal surgery (101 cases and 904 controls), we built a prediction model for post-operative surgical site infections (SSIs) using Gaussian process (GP) regression, time warping and imputation methods to manage the sparsity of the data source, and support vector machines for classification. For most blood tests, wider confidence intervals after imputation were obtained in patients with SSI. Predictive performance with individual blood tests was maintained or improved by joint model prediction, and non-linear classifiers performed consistently better than linear models.