Machine Learning and Medical Data: Predicting ICU Mortality and Re-admission Risks

Intensive care units (ICUs) are divisions where critically ill patients are treated by medical experts. The unmet and vital need for automated clinical decision-making mechanisms is critical to maneuvering the large influx of patients. This became more apparent after the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing studies focus on determining the probability of patients dying in the ICUs and prioritizing patients in dire need. Only a few studies have calculated the patient's probability of returning to the ICUs after discharge. These studies reduce the problem into a binary task of predicting mortality or re-admission only. However, this is unrealistic since both outcomes are highly possible for each patient. In this interdisciplinary study, two main contributions are proposed for the automated clinical decision-making state-of-the-art: (1) using the real-life data collected from thousands of ICU patients by healthcare professionals, three possibilities (recovery, mortality, and returning to the intensive care unit within 30 days) are predicted for patients in intensive care instead of just one possibility. (2) A novel feature extraction approach is proposed by the biomedical expert in our team. Four machine learning algorithms are applied to the finalized feature set to understand the difference between the binary and the multi-class classification problems. Obtained results reach 78% success, proving the possibility of developing better clinical decision-making mechanisms for ICUs.