Methodological Domains

Improving Sepsis Prediction Model Generalization With Optimal Transport

Sepsis is a deadly condition affecting many patients in the hospital. To circumvent the curse from noisy and unbalanced samples, we develop a novel two-step approach for sepsis prediction: given feature-label points from the source domain and feature points from the target domain, to obtain a sepsis predictor that has satisfactory performance at the target domain. The proposed algorithm first learns how to transform sample points from the source domain to the target domain, and then applies the distributionally robust optimization (DRO) technique with the Sinkhorn distance and asymmetric cost function to reliably obtain a classifier with satisfactory out-of-sample performance. 

Integrating Structured and Unstructured Data for Timely Prediction of Bloodstream Infection among Children

Hospitalized children with central venous lines (CVLs) are at higher risk of hospital-acquired infections. Information in electronic health records (EHRs) can be employed in training deep learning models to predict the onset of these infections. Integrating clinical notes with structured EHR data improved the prediction of serious bloodstream infections among pediatric patients with CVLs.

Machine Learning Approaches to Identify Discriminative Signatures of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) from Bacteria and Fungi Using SPME-DART-MS

Point-of-care screening tools are essential to expedite patient care and decrease reliance on slow diagnostic tools (e.g., microbial cultures) to identify pathogens and their associated antibiotic resistance. This study presents a new approach for the identification of pathogens from VOC signatures collected using SPME and ambient ionization MS by training classifiers on just a few samples of data. This ambient plasma ionization and ML approach is robust, rapid, precise, and can potentially be used as a non-invasive clinical diagnostic tool for point-of-care applications.

OnAI-Comp: An Online AI Experts Competing Framework for Early Sepsis Detection

Sepsis has always been a main public concern due to its high mortality, morbidity, and financial cost. There are many existing works of early sepsis prediction using different machine learning models to mitigate the outcomes brought by sepsis. In the practical scenario, the dataset grows dynamically as new patients visit the hospital. Most existing models, being '`offline'' models and having used retrospective observational data, cannot be updated and improved using the new data. Incorporating the new data to improve the offline models requires retraining the model, which is very computationally expensive. To solve the challenge mentioned above, we propose an Online Artificial Intelligence Experts Competing Framework (OnAI-Comp) for early sepsis detection using an online learning algorithm called Multi-armed Bandit. 

Cluster analysis and profiling of airway fluid metabolites in pediatric acute hypoxemic respiratory failure

Hierarchal clustering of amino acid metabolites may identify a metabolic signature in children with pediatric acute hypoxemic respiratory failure. We used hierarchal clustering and partial least squares-discriminant analysis to profile the tracheal aspirate airway fluid using quantitative LC–MS/MS to explore clusters of metabolites that correlated with acute hypoxemia severity and ventilator-free days. Three clusters of children that differed by severity of hypoxemia and ventilator-free days were identified. Quantitative pathway enrichment analysis showed that cysteine and methionine metabolism, selenocompound metabolism, glycine, serine and threonine metabolism, arginine biosynthesis, and valine, leucine, and isoleucine biosynthesis were the top five enriched, impactful pathways. 

Uncertainty-Aware Convolutional Neural Network for Identifying Bilateral Opacities on Chest X-rays: A Tool to Aid Diagnosis of Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome

Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) is a severe lung injury with high mortality, primarily characterized by bilateral pulmonary opacities on chest radiographs and hypoxemia. In this work, we trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) model that can reliably identify bilateral opacities on routine chest X-ray images of critically ill patients. We propose this model as a tool to generate predictive alerts for possible ARDS cases, enabling early diagnosis. We used a novel training technique that enables the CNN to explicitly predict the ‘equivocal’ class using an uncertainty-aware label smoothing loss.