Model improves prediction of mortality risk in ICU patients

Wednesday, August 29, 2018 - 11:50 in Health & Medicine

In intensive care units, where patients come in with a wide range of health conditions, triaging relies heavily on clinical judgment. ICU staff run numerous physiological tests, such as bloodwork and checking vital signs, to determine if patients are at immediate risk of dying if not treated aggressively. Enter: machine learning. Numerous models have been developed in recent years to help predict patient mortality in the ICU, based on various health factors during their stay. These models, however, have performance drawbacks. One common type of “global” model is trained on a single large patient population. These might work well on average, but poorly on some patient subpopulations. On the other hand, another type of model analyzes different subpopulations — for instance, those grouped by similar conditions, patient ages, or hospital departments — but often have limited data for training and testing. In a paper recently presented at the Proceedings of Knowledge Discovery and...

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