Rare Event Early Detection: A Dataset of Sepsis Onset for Critically Ill Trauma Patients

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new publicly available dataset specifically for early detection of post-trauma sepsis in critically ill patients, addressing limitations of existing ICU datasets and framing the problem as a rare event detection task.

Contribution

The authors provide a standardized, relabeled dataset for post-trauma sepsis onset, validated from MIMIC-III, and establish a benchmark for early detection in clinical ICU workflows.

Findings

Existing datasets overlook trauma-specific sepsis challenges.

Benchmark results highlight the need for advanced detection methods.

The dataset enables targeted research on post-trauma sepsis detection.

Abstract

Sepsis is a major public health concern due to its high morbidity, mortality, and cost. Its clinical outcome can be substantially improved through early detection and timely intervention. By leveraging publicly available datasets, machine learning (ML) has driven advances in both research and clinical practice. However, existing public datasets consider ICU patients (Intensive Care Unit) as a uniform group and neglect the potential challenges presented by critically ill trauma patients in whom injury-related inflammation and organ dysfunction can overlap with the clinical features of sepsis. We propose that a targeted identification of post-traumatic sepsis is necessary in order to develop methods for early detection. Therefore, we introduce a publicly available standardized post-trauma sepsis onset dataset extracted, relabeled using standardized post-trauma clinical facts, and validated from MIMIC-III. Furthermore, we frame early detection of post-trauma sepsis onset according to clinical workflow in ICUs in a daily basis resulting in a new rare event detection problem. We then establish a general benchmark through comprehensive experiments, which shows the necessity of further advancements using this new dataset. The data code is available at https://github.com/ML4UWHealth/SepsisOnset_TraumaCohort.git.