Temporal Pattern Detection to Predict Adverse Events in Critical Care: Case Study With Acute Kidney Injury

Background More than 20% of patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) develop an adverse event (AE). No previous study has leveraged patients’ data to extract the temporal features using their structural temporal patterns, that is, trends. Objective This study aimed to improve AE prediction methods by using structural temporal pattern detection that captures global and local temporal trends and to demonstrate these improvements in the detection of acute kidney injury (AKI). Methods Using the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care dataset, containing 22,542 patients, we extracted both global and local trends using structural pattern detection methods to predict AKI (ie, binary prediction). Classifiers were built on 17 input features consisting of vital signs and laboratory test results using state-of-the-art models; the optimal classifier was selected for comparisons with previous approaches. The classifier with structural pattern detection features was compared with two baseline classifiers that used different temporal feature extraction approaches commonly used in the literature: (1) symbolic temporal pattern detection, which is the most common approach for multivariate time series classification; and (2) the last recorded value before the prediction point, which is the most common approach to extract temporal data in the AKI prediction literature. Moreover, we assessed the individual contribution of global and local trends. Classifier performance was measured in terms of accuracy (primary outcome), area under the curve, and F-measure. For all experiments, we employed 20-fold cross-validation. Results Random forest was the best classifier using structural temporal pattern detection. The accuracy of the classifier with local and global trend features was significantly higher than that while using symbolic temporal pattern detection and the last recorded value (81.3% vs 70.6% vs 58.1%; P<.001). Excluding local or global features reduced the accuracy to 74.4% or 78.1%, respectively (P<.001). Conclusions Classifiers using features obtained from structural temporal pattern detection significantly improved the prediction of AKI onset in ICU patients over two baselines based on common previous approaches. The proposed method is a generalizable approach to predict AEs in critical care that may be used to help clinicians intervene in a timely manner to prevent or mitigate AEs.