Severe sepsis mortality prediction with logistic regression over latent factors

Sepsis is one of the main causes of death for non-coronary ICU (Intensive Care Unit) patients and has become the 10th most common cause of death in western societies. This is a transversal condition affecting immunocompromised patients, critically ill patients, post-surgery patients, patients with AIDS, and the elderly. In western countries, septic patients account for as much as 25% of ICU bed utilization and the pathology affects 1–2% of all hospitalizations. Its mortality rates range from 12.8% for sepsis to 45.7% for septic shock.The prediction of mortality caused by sepsis is, therefore, a relevant research challenge from a medical viewpoint. The clinical indicators currently in use for this type of prediction have been criticized for their poor prognostic significance. In this study, we redescribe sepsis indicators through latent model-based feature extraction, using factor analysis. These extracted indicators are then applied to the prediction of mortality caused by sepsis. The reported results show that the proposed method improves on the results obtained with the current standard mortality predictor, which is based on the APACHE II score.

► Sepsis is one of the main causes of death for non-coronary ICU patients.
► Clinical indicators in use for mortality prediction from sepsis perform poorly.
► A new factor description of mortality indicators is provided in this paper.
► These factors are shown to improve on current mortality prediction results.
► This improvement is achieved without compromising the interpretability of results.