Sepsis is a leading cause of mortality in intensive care units (ICUs), representing a substantial medical challenge. The complexity of analyzing diverse vital signs to predict sepsis further aggravates this issue. While deep learning techniques have been advanced for early sepsis prediction, their 'black-box' nature obscures the internal logic, impairing interpretability in critical settings like ICUs. This paper introduces a framework that combines a deep learning model with an attention mechanism that highlights the critical time steps in the forecasting process, thus improving model interpretability and supporting clinical decision-making. We show that the attention mechanism could be adapted to various black box time series forecasting models such as N-HiTS and N-BEATS. Our method preserves the accuracy of conventional deep learning models while enhancing interpretability through attention-weight-generated heatmaps. We evaluated our model on the eICU-CRD dataset, focusing on forecasting vital signs for sepsis patients. We assessed its performance using mean squared error (MSE) and dynamic time warping (DTW) metrics. We explored the attention maps of N-HiTS and N-BEATS, examining the differences in their performance and identifying crucial factors influencing vital sign forecasting.

该研究通过结合深度学习模型和注意力机制的框架，提高其在预测败血症过程中的可解释性，从而支持临床决策。研究通过评估基于eICU-CRD数据集的模型在预测败血症患者生命体征方面的表现，并采用均方误差（MSE）和动态时间规整（DTW）度量来评估其性能，同时探索了N-HiTS和N-BEATS的注意力图，研究关键因素对生命体征预测的影响。

可解释的生命体征预测与模型无关的注意力图