Towards Understanding ICU Treatments Using Patient Health Trajectories

Alexander Galozy, Slawomir Nowaczyk, Anita Pinheiro Sant'Anna

Abstract: Overtreatment or mistreatment of patients is a phenomenon commonly encountered in health care and especially in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) resulting in increased morbidity and mortality. We explore the MIMIC-III intensive care unit database and conduct experiments on an interpretable feature space based on the fusion of severity subscores, commonly used to predict mortality in an ICU setting. Clustering of medication and procedure context vectors based on a semantic representation has been performed to find common and individual treatment patterns. Two-day patient health state trajectories of a cohort of congestive heart failure patients are clustered and correlated with the treatment and evaluated based on an increase or reduction of probability of mortality on the second day of stay. Experimental results show differences in treatments and outcomes and the potential for using patient health state trajectories as a starting point for further evaluation of medical treatments and interventions.