A Time-Phased Machine Learning Model for Real-Time Prediction of Sepsis in Critical Care

As a life-threatening condition, sepsis is one of the major public health issues worldwide. Early prediction can improve sepsis outcomes with appropriate interventions. With the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2019, we aimed to develop and validate a machine learning algorithm with high prediction performance and clinical interpretability for prediction of sepsis onset during critical care in real-time.

Retrospective observational cohort study.

The dataset was collected from three ICUs in three different U.S. hospitals. Two of them were publicly available for model development (offline) and one was used for testing (online).

Forty-thousand three-hundred thirty-six ICU patients from the two model development databases and 24,819 from the test database. There are up to 40 hourly-recorded clinical variables for each ICU stay. The Sepsis-3 criteria were used to confirm sepsis onset.

None.

Three-hundred twelve features were constructed hourly as the input of our proposed Time-phAsed machine learning model for Sepsis Prediction. Time-phAsed machine learning model for Sepsis Prediction first estimates the likelihood of sepsis onset for each hour of an ICU stay in the following 6 hours, and then makes a binary prediction with three time-phased cutoff values. On the internal validation set, the utility score (official challenge measurement) achieved by Time-phAsed machine learning model for Sepsis Prediction was 0.430. On the test set, the utility score reached was 0.354. Furthermore, Time-phAsed machine learning model for Sepsis Prediction provides an intuitive way to illustrate the impact of the input features on the outcome prediction, which makes it clinically interpretable.

The proposed Time-phAsed machine learning model for Sepsis Prediction model is accurate and interpretable for real-time prediction of sepsis onset in critical care, which holds great potential for further evaluation in prospective studies.