Explainable and efficient deep early warning system for cardiac arrest prediction from electronic health records

Cardiac arrest (CA) is a fatal acute event. The development of new CA early warning system based on time series of vital signs from electronic health records (EHR) has great potential to reduce CA damage. In this process, recursive architecture-based deep learning, as a powerful tool for time series data processing, enables automatically extract features from various monitoring clinical parameters and to further improve the performance for acute critical illness prediction. However, the unexplainable nature and excessive time caused by black box structure with poor parallelism are the limitations of its development, especially in the CA clinical application with strict requirement of emergency treatment and low hidden dangers. In this study, we present an explainable and efficient deep early warning system for CA prediction, which features are captured by an efficient temporal convolutional network (TCN) on EHR clinical parameters sequence and explained by deep Taylor decomposition (DTD) theoretical framework. To demonstrate the feasibility of our method and further evaluate its performance, prediction and explanation experiments were performed. Experimental results show that our method achieves superior CA prediction accuracy compared with standard national early warning score (NEWS), in terms of overall AUROC (0.850 Vs. 0.476) and F1-Score (0.750 Vs. 0.450). Furthermore, our method improves the interpretability and efficiency of deep learning-based CA early warning system. It provides the relevance of prediction results for each clinical parameter and about 1.7 times speed enhancement for system calculation compared with the long short-term memory network.