Neural Survival Clustering: Non-parametric mixture of neural networks for survival clustering.

Survival analysis involves the modelling of the times to event. Proposed neural network approaches maximise the predictive performance of traditional survival models at the cost of their interpretability. This impairs their applicability in high stake domains such as medicine. Providing insights into the survival distributions would tackle this issue and advance the medical understanding of diseases. This paper approaches survival analysis as a mixture of neural baselines whereby different baseline cumulative hazard functions are modelled using positive and monotone neural networks. The efficiency of the solution is demonstrated on three datasets while enabling the discovery of new survival phenotypes.

Imputation Strategies Under Clinical Presence: Impact on Algorithmic Fairness.

Biases have marked medical history, leading to unequal care affecting marginalised groups. The patterns of missingness in observational data often reflect these group discrepancies, but the algorithmic fairness implications of group-specific missingness are not well understood. Despite its potential impact, imputation is too often an overlooked preprocessing step. When explicitly considered, attention is placed on overall performance, ignoring how this preprocessing can reinforce groupspecific inequities. Our work questions this choice by studying how imputation affects downstream algorithmic fairness. First, we provide a structured view of the relationship between clinical presence mechanisms and groupspecific missingness patterns. Then, through simulations and real-world experiments, we demonstrate that the imputation choice influences marginalised group performance and that no imputation strategy consistently reduces disparities. Importantly, our results show that current practices may endanger health equity as similarly performing imputation strategies at the population level can affect marginalised groups differently. Finally, we propose recommendations for mitigating inequities that may stem from a neglected step of the machine learning pipeline.

Sex differences in post cardiac arrest discharge locations.

BACKGROUND: We explored sex-based differences in discharge location after resuscitation from cardiac arrest. METHODS: We performed a single-center retrospective cohort study including patients hospitalized after resuscitation from cardiac arrest from January 2010 to May 2020. We identified patients from a prospective registry, from which we extracted standard demographic and clinical variables. We explored favorable discharge location, defined as discharge to home or acute rehabilitation for survivors to hospital discharge. We tested the association of sex with the residuals of a multivariable logistic regression built using bidirectional selection to control for clinically relevant covariates. RESULTS: We included 2,278 patients. Mean age was 59 (SD 16), 40% were women, and 77% were admitted after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. A total of 970 patients (43%) survived to discharge; of those, 607 (63% of survivors) had a favorable discharge location. Female sex showed a weak independent association with unfavorable discharge location (adjusted OR 0.94 (95%CI 0.89-0.99)). CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest a possible sex-based disparity in discharge location after cardiac arrest.

Prediction of hypotension events with physiologic vital sign signatures in the intensive care unit.

BACKGROUND: Even brief hypotension is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. We developed a machine learning model to predict the initial hypotension event among intensive care unit (ICU) patients and designed an alert system for bedside implementation. MATERIALS AND METHODS: From the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-3) dataset, minute-by-minute vital signs were extracted. A hypotension event was defined as at least five measurements within a 10-min period of systolic blood pressure ≤ 90 mmHg and mean arterial pressure ≤ 60 mmHg. Using time series data from 30-min overlapping time windows, a random forest (RF) classifier was used to predict risk of hypotension every minute. Chronologically, the first half of extracted data was used to train the model, and the second half was used to validate the trained model. The model's performance was measured with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and area under the precision recall curve (AUPRC). Hypotension alerts were generated using risk score time series, a stacked RF model. A lockout time were applied for real-life implementation. RESULTS: We identified 1307 subjects (1580 ICU stays) as the hypotension group and 1619 subjects (2279 ICU stays) as the non-hypotension group. The RF model showed AUROC of 0.93 and 0.88 at 15 and 60 min, respectively, before hypotension, and AUPRC of 0.77 at 60 min before. Risk score trajectories revealed 80% and > 60% of hypotension predicted at 15 and 60 min before the hypotension, respectively. The stacked model with 15-min lockout produced on average 0.79 alerts/subject/hour (sensitivity 92.4%). CONCLUSION: Clinically significant hypotension events in the ICU can be predicted at least 1 h before the initial hypotension episode. With a highly sensitive and reliable practical alert system, a vast majority of future hypotension could be captured, suggesting potential real-life utility.