Daphné Chopard

Niklas Raehse, Luregn J. Schlapbach, Daphné Chopard

Antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) is critical in pediatric intensive care units (PICUs), where diagnostic uncertainty often drives broad-spectrum antibiotic use, increasing antimicrobial resistance and potential long-term harms. Machine learning offers a promising approach for identifying patient-level opportunities for stewardship interventions from electronic health record data, yet prior work has focused largely on adult populations and static tabular representations. We present a systematic benchmarking study of AMS intervention prediction in the PICU across a public dataset and a private institutional cohort. We define four clinically relevant proxy targets for reducing antibiotic exposure: intravenous-to-oral switching, de-escalation, discontinuation, and short-course therapy. Under a unified evaluation framework, we compare tabular, sequence-based, and graph-based temporal models at multiple temporal resolutions. We find that predictive performance is driven primarily by target prevalence and dataset characteristics rather than model complexity. Sequence models improve the precision-recall trade-off over tabular approaches at coarse (24-hour) resolution, while finer temporal modeling provides limited additional benefit. However, these gains come at the cost of poorer calibration, with simpler tabular models yielding more reliable probability estimates. Multi-task learning produces only marginal improvements, suggesting limited shared structure across stewardship targets. Our findings highlight the importance of target design, temporal representation, and calibration in clinical machine learning, and provide practical guidance for developing reliable decision support systems for pediatric AMS.

Andrea Agostini, Daphné Chopard, Yang Meng et al.

Multimodal data integration and label scarcity pose significant challenges for machine learning in medical settings. To address these issues, we conduct an in-depth evaluation of the newly proposed Multimodal Variational Mixture-of-Experts (MMVM) VAE on the challenging MIMIC-CXR dataset. Our analysis demonstrates that the MMVM VAE consistently outperforms other multimodal VAEs and fully supervised approaches, highlighting its strong potential for real-world medical applications.

Daphné Chopard, Sonia Laguna, Kieran Chin-Cheong et al.

General movements (GMs) are spontaneous, coordinated body movements in infants that offer valuable insights into the developing nervous system. Assessed through the Prechtl GM Assessment (GMA), GMs are reliable predictors for neurodevelopmental disorders. However, GMA requires specifically trained clinicians, who are limited in number. To scale up newborn screening, there is a need for an algorithm that can automatically classify GMs from infant video recordings. This data poses challenges, including variability in recording length, device type, and setting, with each video coarsely annotated for overall movement quality. In this work, we introduce a tool for extracting features from these recordings and explore various machine learning techniques for automated GM classification.