Bi-Directional Gated Recurrent Unit Based Ensemble Model for the Early Detection of Sepsis

Early prediction of sepsis is essential to give the patient timely treatment since each hour of delayed treatment has been associated with an increase in mortality. Current sepsis detection systems rely on empirical Clinical Decision Rules(CDR)s, which are based on vital signs that can be collected from the bedside. The main disadvantages of CDRs include questions of generalizability and performance variance when applied to the populations different from the groups used for derivation and often take years to develop and validate. This paper proposes a deep learning model using Bi-Directional Gated Recurrent Units(GRU), which uses a wide range of parameters that are associated with vitals, laboratory, and demographics of patients. The proposed model has an area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) of 0.97, outperforming all the existing systems in the current literature. The model can handle the missing data, and irregular sampling intervals frequently present in medical records.