Continual Deterioration Prediction for Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients
This work addresses the need for accurate daily outcome predictions for hospitalized COVID-19 patients, though it is incremental as it builds on existing predictive modeling with a novel segmentation approach.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting COVID-19 patient deterioration during hospitalization by developing a temporal stratification method that segments training data by remaining length of stay, achieving preliminary results of 0.98 AUROC, 0.91 F1 score, and 0.97 AUPR.
Leading up to August 2020, COVID-19 has spread to almost every country in the world, causing millions of infected and hundreds of thousands of deaths. In this paper, we first verify the assumption that clinical variables could have time-varying effects on COVID-19 outcomes. Then, we develop a temporal stratification approach to make daily predictions on patients' outcome at the end of hospital stay. Training data is segmented by the remaining length of stay, which is a proxy for the patient's overall condition. Based on this, a sequence of predictive models are built, one for each time segment. Thanks to the publicly shared data, we were able to build and evaluate prototype models. Preliminary experiments show 0.98 AUROC, 0.91 F1 score and 0.97 AUPR on continuous deterioration prediction, encouraging further development of the model as well as validations on different datasets. We also verify the key assumption which motivates our method. Clinical variables could have time-varying effects on COVID-19 outcomes. That is to say, the feature importance of a variable in the predictive model varies at different disease stages.