A Deep Learning Approach to Predicting the Length of Stay of Newborns in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

Sammanfattning: Recent advancements in machine learning and the widespread adoption of electronic healthrecords have enabled breakthroughs for several predictive modelling tasks in health care. One such task that has seen considerable improvements brought by deep neural networks is length of stay (LOS) prediction, in which research has mainly focused on adult patients in the intensive care unit. This thesis uses multivariate time series extracted from the publicly available Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III database to explore the potential of deep learning for classifying the remaining LOS of newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at each hour of the stay. To investigate this, this thesis describes experiments conducted with various deep learning models, including long short-term memory cells, gated recurrentunits, fully-convolutional networks and several composite networks. This work demonstrates that modelling the remaining LOS of newborns in the NICU as a multivariate time series classification problem naturally facilitates repeated predictions over time as the stay progresses and enables advanced deep learning models to outperform a multinomial logistic regression baseline trained on hand-crafted features. Moreover, it shows the importance of the newborn’s gestational age and binary masks indicating missing values as variables for predicting the remaining LOS.