M-ClustEHR: A multimodal clustering approach for electronic health records

Sepsis refers to a potentially life-threatening situation where the immune system of the human body has an extreme response to an infection. In the presence of underlying comorbidities, the situation can become even worse and result in death. Employing unsupervised machine learning techniques, such as clustering, can assist in providing a better understanding of patient phenotypes by unveiling subgroups characterized by distinct sepsis progression and treatment patterns. More concretely, this study introduces M-ClustEHR, a clustering approach that utilizes medical data of multiple modalities by employing a multimodal autoencoder for learning comprehensive sepsis patient representations. M-ClustEHR consistently outperforms traditional clustering approaches in terms of several internal clustering performance metrics, as well as cluster stability in identifying phenotypes in the sepsis cohort. The unveiled patterns, supported by existing medical literature and clinicians, highlight the importance of multimodal clustering for advancing personalized sepsis care.