Background:

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition with high mortality rates. Early detection and treatment are critical to improving outcomes. Our primary objective was to develop artificial intelligence capable of predicting sepsis earlier using a minimal set of streaming physiological data in real time.

Methods and Findings:

A total of 29,552 adult patients were admitted to the intensive care unit across five regional hospitals in Memphis, Tenn, over 18 months from January 2017 to July 2018. From these, 5,958 patients were selected after filtering for continuous (minute-by-minute) physiological data availability. A total of 617 (10.4%) patients were identified as sepsis cases, using the Third International Consensus Definitions for Sepsis and Septic Shock (Sepsis-3) criteria. Physiomarkers, a set of signal processing features, were derived from five physiological data streams including heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure (systolic, diastolic, and mean), captured every minute from the bedside monitors. A support vector machine classifier was used for classification. The model accurately predicted sepsis up to a mean and 95% confidence interval of 17.4±0.22 h before sepsis onset, with an average test accuracy of 83.0%(average sensitivity, specificity, and area under the receiver operating characteristics curve of 0.757, 0.902, and 0.781, respectively).

Conclusions:

This study demonstrates that salient physiomarkers derived from continuous bedside monitoring are temporally and differentially expressed in septic patients. Using this information, minimalistic artificial intelligence models can be developed to predict sepsis earlier in critically ill patients.