Temporal Pattern Discovery for Accurate Sepsis Diagnosis in ICU Patients

Sepsis is a condition caused by the body's overwhelming and life-threatening response to infection, which can lead to tissue damage, organ failure, and finally death. Common signs and symptoms include fever, increased heart rate, increased breathing rate, and confusion. Sepsis is difficult to predict, diagnose, and treat. Patients who develop sepsis have an increased risk of complications and death and face higher health care costs and longer hospitalization. Today, sepsis is one of the leading causes of mortality among populations in intensive care units (ICUs). In this paper, we look at the problem of early detection of sepsis by using temporal data mining. We focus on the use of knowledge-based temporal abstraction to create meaningful interval-based abstractions, and on time-interval mining to discover frequent interval-based patterns. We used 2,560 cases derived from the MIMIC-III database. We found that the distribution of the temporal patterns whose frequency is above 10% discovered in the records of septic patients during the last 6 and 12 hours before onset of sepsis is significantly different from that distribution within a similar period, during an equivalent time window during hospitalization, in the records of non-septic patients. This discovery is encouraging for the purpose of performing an early diagnosis of sepsis using the discovered patterns as constructed features.