A Transformer-based Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Heart Rate and Blood Pressure Forecasting in Intensive Care Unit
This addresses the need for accurate and efficient vital sign prediction in intensive care units, representing a strong specific gain in a domain-specific application.
The study tackled the problem of forecasting heart rate and blood pressure in ICU patients by proposing a Transformer-based diffusion model, achieving an 18.9% improvement in SACRPS and a 34.3% improvement in MSE over the best baseline, with inference speed over 17 times faster.
Background and Objective: Vital sign monitoring in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is crucial for enabling prompt interventions for patients. This underscores the need for an accurate predictive system. Therefore, this study proposes a novel deep learning approach for forecasting Heart Rate (HR), Systolic Blood Pressure (SBP), and Diastolic Blood Pressure (DBP) in the ICU. Methods: We extracted $24,886$ ICU stays from the MIMIC-III database which contains data from over $46$ thousand patients, to train and test the model. The model proposed in this study, Transformer-based Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Sparse Time Series Forecasting (TDSTF), merges Transformer and diffusion models to forecast vital signs. The TDSTF model showed state-of-the-art performance in predicting vital signs in the ICU, outperforming other models' ability to predict distributions of vital signs and being more computationally efficient. The code is available at https://github.com/PingChang818/TDSTF. Results: The results of the study showed that TDSTF achieved a Standardized Average Continuous Ranked Probability Score (SACRPS) of $0.4438$ and a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of $0.4168$, an improvement of $18.9\%$ and $34.3\%$ over the best baseline model, respectively. The inference speed of TDSTF is more than $17$ times faster than the best baseline model. Conclusion: TDSTF is an effective and efficient solution for forecasting vital signs in the ICU, and it shows a significant improvement compared to other models in the field.