The Role of Baroreflex Sensitivity in Acute Hypotensive Episodes Prediction in the Intensive Care Unit

A life threatening condition in Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is the Acute Hypotensive Episode (AHE). Patients experiencing an AHE may suffer from irreversible organ damage associated with increased mortality. Predicting the onset of AHE could be of pivotal importance to establish appropriate and timely interventions. We propose a method that, using waveforms widely acquired in ICU, like Arterial Blood Pressure (ABP) and Electrocardiogram (ECG), will extract features relative to the cardiac system to predict whether or not a patient will experience a hypotensive episode. Specifically, we want to assess if there are hidden patterns in the dynamics of baroreflex able to improve the prediction of AHEs. We will investigate the predictive power of features related to the baroreflex by performing classifications with and without them. Results are obtained using 17 classifiers belonging to different model families: classification trees, Support Vector Machines (SVMs), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNNs) replicated with different set of hyper-parameters and logistic regression. On average, the use of baroreflex features in the AHE prediction process increases the Area Under the Curve (AUC) by 10%.