A Model for Predicting Sepsis in Polytrauma Patients in the ICU

Abstract:
Sepsis is a life-threatening, critical condition often encountered in a 
hospital's intensive care unit (ICU). Starting as a body's response to 
infection, sepsis causes injury to the patient's tissue and organs and 
can lead to severe sepsis or septic shock, resulting in multiple organ 
failure and high risk of mortality. However, sepsis can be treated 
effectively if identified early and medicated in a timely manner. We 
present work in progress on a model that is able to predict sepsis with 
an AUROC of up to 0.82 before sepsis onset in a polytrauma cohort in the 
ICU. Our experiments show that careful selection of training examples 
and the incorporation of physicians' knowledge is crucial for the 
predictive power of such a model.