M.S. AAI Capstone Chronicles 2024

Figure 6 Plots of Deterioration Index (DI) vs. Model Predictions. Left: A patient where SCT correctly predicted positive sepsis (red) and one where SCT correctly predicted negative sepsis (green). Right: A patient where SCT correctly predicted a negative outcome even though the trend pointed to

deterioration.

Conclusion This project demonstrated promising results while underscoring the many challenges that are faced when attempting to accurately predict sepsis onset in a clinical setting. These challenges included the high occurrence of missing data, sparsity in certain feature readings with respect to time (lab samples), significant class imbalance and the need to build up a relatively long context window of readings for a patient before the predictions became reliable. The development of the Deterioration Index feature proved helpful in overcoming some of the challenges. Since this feature looked at changes in critical attributes at the current time step as compared to the previous time step, a lag was naturally incorporated, which appeared helpful in smoothing over missing data as well as the sparse lab readings.

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