Personalized Risk Scoring for Critical Care Patients using Mixtures of Gaussian Process Experts
This work addresses the need for timely and granular risk scoring in critical care settings, offering a personalized approach that could improve patient monitoring and outcomes.
The authors tackled the problem of providing personalized, real-time risk assessments for critical care patients by developing a mixture of Gaussian Process experts algorithm that captures patient heterogeneity and uses self-taught transfer learning. The result showed that their risk score outperformed existing scores like MEWS and Rothman on a cohort of 6,313 patients.
We develop a personalized real time risk scoring algorithm that provides timely and granular assessments for the clinical acuity of ward patients based on their (temporal) lab tests and vital signs. Heterogeneity of the patients population is captured via a hierarchical latent class model. The proposed algorithm aims to discover the number of latent classes in the patients population, and train a mixture of Gaussian Process (GP) experts, where each expert models the physiological data streams associated with a specific class. Self-taught transfer learning is used to transfer the knowledge of latent classes learned from the domain of clinically stable patients to the domain of clinically deteriorating patients. For new patients, the posterior beliefs of all GP experts about the patient's clinical status given her physiological data stream are computed, and a personalized risk score is evaluated as a weighted average of those beliefs, where the weights are learned from the patient's hospital admission information. Experiments on a heterogeneous cohort of 6,313 patients admitted to Ronald Regan UCLA medical center show that our risk score outperforms the currently deployed risk scores, such as MEWS and Rothman scores.