JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In most of Taiwan’s medical institutions, congestion is a serious problem for emergency departments. Due to a lack of beds, patients spend more time in emergency retention zones, which make it difficult to detect cardiac arrest (CA).

Objective:

We seek to develop a Drug Early Warning System Model (DEWSM), it included drug injections and vital signs as this research important features. We use it to predict cardiac arrest in emergency departments via drug classification and medical expert suggestion.

Methods:

We propose this new model for detecting cardiac arrest via drug classification and by using a sliding window; we apply learning-based algorithms to time-series data for a DEWSM. By treating drug features as a dynamic time-series factor for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) patients, we increase sensitivity, reduce false alarm rates and mortality, and increase the model’s accuracy. To evaluate the proposed model, we use the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC).

Results:

Four important findings are as follows: (1) We identify the most important drug predictors: bits (intravenous therapy), and replenishers and regulators of water and electrolytes (fluid and electrolyte supplement). The best AUROC of bits is 85%, it means the medical expert suggest the drug features: bits, it will affect the vital signs, and then the evaluate this model correctly classified patients with CPR reach 85%; that of replenishers and regulators of water and electrolytes is 86%. These two features are the most influential of the drug features in the task. (2) We verify feature selection, in which accounting for drugs improve the accuracy: In Task 1, the best AUROC of vital signs is 77%, and that of all features is 86%. In Task 2, the best AUROC of all features is 85%, which demonstrates that thus accounting for the drugs significantly affects prediction. (3) We use a better model: For traditional machine learning, this study adds a new AI technology: the long short-term memory (LSTM) model with the best time-series accuracy, comparable to the traditional random forest (RF) model; the two AUROC measures are 85%. It can be seen that the use of new AI technology will achieve better results, currently comparable to the accuracy of traditional common RF, and the LSTM model can be adjusted in the future to obtain better results. (4) We determine whether the event can be predicted beforehand: The best classifier is still an RF model, in which the observational starting time is 4 hours before the CPR event. Although the accuracy is impaired, the predictive accuracy still reaches 70%. Therefore, we believe that CPR events can be predicted four hours before the event.

Conclusions:

This paper uses a sliding window to account for dynamic time-series data consisting of the patient’s vital signs and drug injections. The National Early Warning Score (NEWS) only focuses on the score of vital signs, and does not include factors related to drug injections. In this study, the experimental results of adding the drug injections are better than only vital signs. In a comparison with NEWS, we improve predictive accuracy via feature selection, which includes drugs as features. In addition, we use traditional machine learning methods and deep learning (using LSTM method as the main processing time series data) as the basis for comparison of this research. The proposed DEWSM, which offers 4-hour predictions, is better than the NEWS in the literature. This also confirms that the doctor’s heuristic rules are consistent with the results found by machine learning algorithms.