ICU Patient Deterioration prediction: a Data-Mining Approach

A huge amount of medical data is generated every day, which presents a challenge in analysing these data. The obvious solution to this challenge is to reduce the amount of data without information loss. Dimension reduction is considered the most popular approach for reducing data size and also to reduce noise and redundancies in data. In this paper, we investigate the effect of feature selection in improving the prediction of patient deterioration in ICUs. We consider lab tests as features. Thus, choosing a subset of features would mean choosing the most important lab tests to perform. If the number of tests can be reduced by identifying the most important tests, then we could also identify the redundant tests. By omitting the redundant tests, observation time could be reduced and early treatment could be provided to avoid the risk. Additionally, unnecessary monetary cost would be avoided. Our approach uses state-of-the-art feature selection for predicting ICU patient deterioration using the medical lab results. We apply our technique on the publicly available MIMIC-II database and show the effectiveness of the feature selection. We also provide a detailed analysis of the best features identified by our approach.