Sepsis is a leading cause of death in the Intensive Care Units (ICU). Early detection of sepsis is critical for patient survival. In this paper, we propose a multimodal Transformer model for early sepsis prediction, using the physiological time series data and clinical notes for each patient within $36$ hours of ICU admission. Specifically, we aim to predict sepsis using only the first 12, 18, 24, 30 and 36 hours of laboratory measurements, vital signs, patient demographics, and clinical notes. We evaluate our model on two large critical care datasets: MIMIC-III and eICU-CRD. The proposed method is compared with six baselines. In addition, ablation analysis and case studies are conducted to study the influence of each individual component of the model and the contribution of each data modality for early sepsis prediction. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms competitive baselines on all metrics.

本篇研究提出了一种基于多模态 Transformer 模型的早期脓毒症预测方法，使用每位患者在 ICU 入院后 36 小时内的生理时间序列数据和临床笔记，仅利用前 12、18、24、30 和 36 小时的实验室指标、生命体征、患者特征和临床笔记进行预测。在 MIMIC-III 和 eICU-CRD 两个大型重症监护数据集上评估了我们的模型，结果证明我们的方法在所有指标上优于竞争基线。

应用Transformer集成生理时间序列和临床记录进行早期脓毒症预测