Abstract Early hospital mortality prediction is critical as intensivists strive to make efficient medical decisions about the severely ill patients staying in intensive care units (ICUs). As a result, various methods have been developed to address this problem based on clinical records. However, some of the laboratory test results are time-consuming and need to be processed. In this paper, we propose a novel method to predict mortality using features extracted from the heart signals of patients within the first hour of ICU admission. In order to predict the risk, quantitative features have been computed based on the heart rate signals of ICU patients suffering cardiovascular diseases. Each signal is described in terms of 12 statistical and signal-based features. The extracted features are fed into eight classifiers: decision tree, linear discriminant, logistic regression, support vector machine (SVM), random forest, boosted trees, Gaussian SVM, and K-nearest neighborhood (K-NN). To derive insight into the performance of the proposed method, several experiments have been conducted using the well-known clinical dataset named Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-III). The experimental results demonstrate the capability of the proposed method in terms of precision, recall, F1-score, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). The decision tree classifier satisfies both accuracy and interpretability better than the other classifiers, producing an F1-score and AUC equal to 0.91 and 0.93 , respectively. It indicates that heart rate signals can be used for predicting mortality in patients in the care units especially coronary care units (CCUs), achieving a comparable performance with existing predictions that rely on high dimensional features from clinical records which need to be processed and may contain missing information.
There are approximately 4 million intensive care unit (ICU) admissions each year in the United States with costs accounting for 4.1 of national health expenditures. Unforeseen adverse events contribute disproportionately to these costs. Thus, there has been substantial research in developing clinical decision support systems to predict and improve ICU outcomes such as ICU mortality, prolonged length of stay, and ICU readmission. However, the data in the ICU is collected at diverse time intervals and includes both static and temporal data. Common methods for static data mining such as Cox and logistic regression and methods for temporal data analysis such as temporal association rule mining do not model the combination of both static and temporal data. This work aims to overcome this challenge to combine static models such as logistic regression and feedforward neural networks with temporal models such as conditional random fields(CRF). We demonstrate the results using adult patient records from a publicly available database called Multi-parameter Intelligent Monitoring in Intensive Care - II (MIMIC-II). We show that the combination models outperformed individual models of logistic regression, feed-forward neural networks and conditional random fields in predicting ICU mortality. The combination models also outperform the static models of logistic regression and feed-forward neural networks for the prediction of 30 day ICU readmissions when tested using Matthews correlation coefficient and accuracy as the metrics. Abstract Background Mortality prediction of hospitalized patients is an important problem. Over the past few decades, several severity scoring systems and machine learning mortality prediction models have been developed for predicting hospital mortality. By contrast, early mortality prediction for intensive care unit patients remains an open challenge. Most research has focused on severity of illness scoring systems or data mining (DM) models designed for risk estimation at least 24 or 48 h after ICU admission. Objectives This study highlights the main data challenges in early mortality prediction in ICU patients and introduces a new machine learning based framework for Early Mortality Prediction for Intensive Care Unit patients (EMPICU). Materials and methods The proposed method is evaluated on the Multiparameter Intelligent Monitoring in Intensive Care II (MIMIC-II) database. Mortality prediction models are developed for patients at the age of 16 or above in Medical ICU (MICU), Surgical ICU (SICU) or Cardiac Surgery Recovery Unit (CSRU). We employ the ensemble learning Random Forest (RF), the predictive Decision Trees (DT), the probabilistic Naive Bayes (NB) and the rule-based Projective Adaptive Resonance Theory (PART) models. The primary outcome was hospital mortality. The explanatory variables included demographic, physiological, vital signs and laboratory test variables. Performance measures were calculated using cross-validated area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) to minimize bias. 11,722 patients with single ICU stays are considered. Only patients at the age of 16 years old and above in Medical ICU (MICU), Surgical ICU (SICU) or Cardiac Surgery Recovery Unit (CSRU) are considered in this study. Results The proposed EMPICU framework outperformed standard scoring systems (SOFA, SAPS-I, APACHE-II, NEWS and qSOFA) in terms of AUROC and time (i.e. at 6 h compared to 48 h or more after admission). Discussion and conclusion The results show that although there are many values missing in the first few hour of ICU admission, there is enough signal to effectively predict mortality during the first 6 h of admission. The proposed framework, in particular the one that uses the ensemble learning approach – EMPICU Random Forest (EMPICU-RF) offers a base to construct an effective and novel mortality prediction model in the early hours of an ICU patient admission, with an improved performance profile.