Septic Shock Prediction for Patients with Missing Data

Sepsis and septic shock are common and potentially fatal conditions that often occur in intensive care unit (ICU) patients. Early prediction of patients at risk for septic shock is therefore crucial to minimizing the effects of these complications. Potential indications for septic shock risk span a wide range of measurements, including physiological data gathered at different temporal resolutions and gene expression levels, leading to a nontrivial prediction problem. Previous works on septic shock prediction have used small, carefully curated datasets or clinical measurements that may not be available for many ICU patients. The recent availability of a large, rich ICU dataset called MIMIC-II has provided the opportunity for more extensive modeling of this problem. However, such a large clinical dataset inevitably contains a substantial amount of missing data. We investigate how different imputation selection criteria and methods can overcome the missing data problem. Our results show that imputation methods in conjunction with predictive modeling can lead to accurate septic shock prediction, even if the features are restricted primarily to noninvasive measurements. Our models provide a generalized approach for predicting septic shock in any ICU patient.