Proactive analysis of patient pathways helps healthcare providers anticipate treatment-related risks, identify outcomes, and allocate resources. Machine learning (ML) can leverage a patient's complete health history to make informed decisions about future events. However, previous work has mostly relied on so-called black-box models, which are unintelligible to humans, making it difficult for clinicians to apply such models. Our work introduces PatWay-Net, an ML framework designed for interpretable predictions of admission to the intensive care unit (ICU) for patients with symptoms of sepsis. We propose a novel type of recurrent neural network and combine it with multi-layer perceptrons to process the patient pathways and produce predictive yet interpretable results. We demonstrate its utility through a comprehensive dashboard that visualizes patient health trajectories, predictive outcomes, and associated risks. Our evaluation includes both predictive performance - where PatWay-Net outperforms standard models such as decision trees, random forests, and gradient-boosted decision trees - and clinical utility, validated through structured interviews with clinicians. By providing improved predictive accuracy along with interpretable and actionable insights, PatWay-Net serves as a valuable tool for healthcare decision support in the critical case of patients with symptoms of sepsis.

利用机器学习和可解释预测的方法，提供对因脓毒症症状患者的重症监护室ICU入院的能力，通过综合仪表盘显示患者的健康轨迹、预测结果和相关风险，提供了改进预测准确性和可解释且可操作的见解，成为危重患者医疗决策支持的有价值工具。

A machine learning framework for interpretable predictions in patient
  pathways: The case of predicting ICU admission for patients with symptoms of
  sepsis

可解释预测患者路径的机器学习框架：以预测症状为脓毒症患者的ICU入院为例