Potential Prognostic Markers in the Heart Rate Variability Features for Early Diagnosis of Sepsis in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit using Convolutional Neural Network Classifiers

Blood infection due to different circumstances could immediately develop to an extreme body reaction that leads to a serious life-threatening condition, called Sepsis. Currently, therapeutic protocols through timely antibiotic resuscitation strategies play an important role to fight against the adverse conditions and improve survival. Therefore, timing, and more specifically early diagnosis of the illness, is crucially important for an effective treatment. Studies have indicated that vital signals such as heart rate variability (HRV) could provide potential prognostic biological markers that can help with early detection of sepsis before it is clinically diagnosed through its actual symptoms. Therefore, this study employs neonatal and pediatric electrocardiogram (ECG) to extract 52 hourly sets of linear and non-linear features from the HRV, starting from 24 hours prior to the clinical diagnosis of sepsis in patients with positive blood cultures (n=14). Similar sets of features were also obtained from a non-sepsis control group to create an evaluation benchmark (n=14).In particular, this study initially demonstrates how the variations within the 24 hours values of specific HRV featuresets could effectively reveal prognostic information about the evolution of sepsis, prior to the actual clinical diagnosis. Moreover, this study demonstrates that differences in the values of a particular set of features at 22 hours before the actual clinical diagnosis/symptoms can be reliably used to train a convolutional neural network for automatic classification between the individuals in the sepsis and non-sepsis groups with 88.89±7.86% accuracy.Clinical relevance— Results suggest potential early diagnosis of sepsis through real-time automatic classification of HRV features as prognostic indicators in clinical ECG recordings.