VitalBench: A Rigorous Multi-Center Benchmark for Long-Term Vital Sign Prediction in Intraoperative Care
This work provides a standardized platform for researchers to develop and compare predictive models in intraoperative care, addressing challenges in clinical practice, though it is incremental as it focuses on benchmarking rather than novel model development.
The authors tackled the lack of standardized benchmarks for intraoperative vital sign prediction by introducing VitalBench, a multi-center benchmark with data from over 4,000 surgeries across two medical centers, which includes three evaluation tracks to address real-world complexities like incomplete data and cross-center generalization.
Intraoperative monitoring and prediction of vital signs are critical for ensuring patient safety and improving surgical outcomes. Despite recent advances in deep learning models for medical time-series forecasting, several challenges persist, including the lack of standardized benchmarks, incomplete data, and limited cross-center validation. To address these challenges, we introduce VitalBench, a novel benchmark specifically designed for intraoperative vital sign prediction. VitalBench includes data from over 4,000 surgeries across two independent medical centers, offering three evaluation tracks: complete data, incomplete data, and cross-center generalization. This framework reflects the real-world complexities of clinical practice, minimizing reliance on extensive preprocessing and incorporating masked loss techniques for robust and unbiased model evaluation. By providing a standardized and unified platform for model development and comparison, VitalBench enables researchers to focus on architectural innovation while ensuring consistency in data handling. This work lays the foundation for advancing predictive models for intraoperative vital sign forecasting, ensuring that these models are not only accurate but also robust and adaptable across diverse clinical environments. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/XiudingCai/VitalBench.