Multitask prediction of organ dysfunction in the intensive care unit using sequential subnetwork routing

Objective Multitask learning (MTL) using electronic health records allows concurrent prediction of multiple endpoints. MTL has shown promise in improving model performance and training efficiency; however, it often suffers from negative transfer - impaired learning if tasks are not appropriately selected. We introduce a sequential subnetwork routing (SeqSNR) architecture that uses soft parameter sharing to find related tasks and encourage cross-learning between them. Materials and methods Using the MIMIC-III (Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care-III) dataset, we train deep neural network models to predict the onset of 6 endpoints including specific organ dysfunctions and general clinical outcomes: acute kidney injury, continuous renal replacement therapy, mechanical ventilation, vasoactive medications, mortality, and length of stay. We compare single-task (ST) models with naive multitask and SeqSNR in terms of discriminative performance and label efficiency. Results SeqSNR showed a modest yet statistically significant performance boost across 4 of 6 tasks compared with ST and naive multitasking. When the size of the training dataset was reduced for a given task (label efficiency), SeqSNR outperformed ST for all cases showing an average area under the precision-recall curve boost of 2.1%, 2.9%, and 2.1% for tasks using 1%, 5%, and 10% of labels, respectively. Conclusions The SeqSNR architecture shows superior label efficiency compared with ST and naive multitasking, suggesting utility in scenarios in which endpoint labels are difficult to ascertain.