Updating mortality risk estimation in intensive care units from high-dimensional electronic health records with...

The risk of mortality in intensive care units (ICUs) is currently addressed by the implementation of scores using admission data. Their performances are satisfactory when complications occur early after admission; however, they may become irrelevant in the case of long hospital stays. In this study, we developed predictive models of short-term mortality in the ICU from longitudinal data.

Using data collected throughout patients' stays of at least 48 h from the MIMIC-III database, several statistical learning approaches were compared, including deep neural networks and penalized regression. Missing data were handled using complete-case analysis or multiple imputation.

Complete-case analyses from 19 predictors showed good discrimination (AUC > 0.77 for several approaches) to predict death between 12 and 24 h onward, yet excluded 75% of patients from the initial target cohort, as data was missing for some of the predictors. Multiple imputation allowed us to include 70 predictors and keep 95% of patients, with similar performances.

This proof-of-concept study supports that automated analysis of electronic health records can be of great interest throughout patients' stays as a surveillance tool. Although this framework relies on a large set of predictors, it is robust to data imputation and may be effective early after admission, when data are still scarce.