Dynamic prediction of life-threatening events for patients in intensive care unit

Early prediction of patients' deterioration is helpful in early intervention for patients at greater risk of deterioration in Intensive Care Unit (ICU). This study aims to apply machine learning approaches to heterogeneous clinical data for predicting life-threatening events of patients in ICU.

We collected clinical data from a total of 3151 patients admitted to the Medical Intensive Care Unit of Peking Union Medical College Hospital in China from January 1st, 2014, to October 1st, 2019. After excluding the patients who were under 18 years old or stayed less than 24 h at the ICU, a total of 2170 patients were enrolled in this study. Multiple machine learning approaches were utilized to predict life-threatening events (i.e., death) in seven 24-h windows (day 1 to day 7) and their performance was compared.

Light Gradient Boosting Machine showed the best performance. We found that life-threatening events during the short-term windows can be better predicted than those in the medium-term windows. For example, death in 24 h can be predicted with an Area Under Curve of 0.905. Features like infusion pump related fluid input were highly related to life-threatening events. Furthermore, the prediction power of static features such as age and cardio-pulmonary function increased with the extended prediction window.

This study demonstrates that the integration of machine learning approaches and large-scale high-quality clinical data in ICU could accurately predict life-threatening events for ICU patients for early intervention.