Identification of Temporal Changes on Patients at Risk of LONS with TPRMine: A Case Study in NICU

A neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) provides specialized care for preterm or ill term infants. The onset of many conditions they can develop are not obvious to physicians until they are significantly impacted and this could result in death. An example of such a problem is neonatal infection which is a common cause of death for premature infants. It remains a challenging task for clinicians to accurately diagnose the presence of bacteria on patients with frequent presence of multiple comorbidities. There is potential for early detection of neonatal infections by timely analysis of patient physiological data and this can lead to improved health outcome of critically ill patients. This paper demonstrates application of a method for Temporal Pattern Recognition and Mining (TPRMine) in order to (a) understand if continuous analysis of temporal changes in patient physiological data streams can lead to discovery of pathophysiological patterns from patients at risk of neonatal sepsis and, (b) utilize the resulting analysis for formulating and testing hypothesis facilitating statistical quantification of patients.