Critical care patients are prone to shift intermittently into delirium or coma without warning. A team at Vanderbilt University Medical Center used machine learning to predict the likelihood of next-day brain function status changes in these patients.
The team’s report appears in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
“Time spent in the ICU with delirium or coma is associated with increased mortality and adverse long-term outcomes such as dementia. Reliable next-day forecasting of these patient transitions into and out of acute brain dysfunction could go a long way toward improving care and ICU resource allocation,” said the principal investigator of the study, You Chen, PhD, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics.
Other Vanderbilt investigators on the study include lead author Chao Yan, a computer science PhD candidate, Cheng Gao, PhD, Ziqi Zhang, Wencong Chen, PhD, Bradley Malin, PhD, E. Wesley Ely, MD, and Mayur Patel, MD, MPH.