Frequent temporal patterns of physiological and biological biomarkers and their evolution in sepsis

Sepsis is one of the most challenging health conditions worldwide, with relatively high incidence and mortality rates. It is shown that preventing sepsis is the key to avoid potentially irreversible organ dysfunction. However, data-driven early identification of sepsis is challenging as sepsis shares signs and symptoms with other health conditions. This paper adopts a temporal pattern mining approach to identify frequent temporal and evolving patterns of physiological and biological biomarkers in sepsis patients. We show that using these frequent patterns as features for classifying sepsis and non-sepsis patients can improve the prediction accuracy and performance up to 7%. Most of the temporal modeling approaches adopted in the sepsis literature are based on deep learning methods. Although these approaches produce high accuracy, they generally have limited model explainability and interpretability. Using the adopted methods in this study, we could identify the most important features contributing to the patients’ sepsis incidence, such as fluctuations in platelet, lactate, and creatinine, or evolution of patterns including renal and metabolic organ systems, and consequently, enhance the findings’ clinical interpretability. •Using frequent temporal patterns can improve the performance of sepsis onset prediction.•The patients with more severe renal and metabolic organ systems’ manifestations are more likely to be sepsis patients.•The identification of critical temporal patterns contributing to the prediction performance improves clinical interpretability.•The rich repository of frequent temporal and evolving patterns can inform personalized treatment and management of sepsis.