Inter-organ correlation based multi-task deep learning model for dynamically predicting functional deterioration in multiple organ systems of ICU patients

BackgroundFunctional deterioration (FD) of various organ systems is the major cause of death in ICU patients, but few studies propose effective multi-task (MT) model to predict FD of multiple organs simultaneously. This study propose a MT deep learning model named inter-organ correlation based multi-task model (IOC-MT), to dynamically predict FD in six organ systems.MethodsThree public ICU databases were used for model training and validation. The IOC-MT was designed based on the routine MT deep learning framework, but it used a Graph Attention Networks (GAT) module to capture inter-organ correlation and an adaptive adjustment mechanism (AAM) to adjust prediction. We compared the IOC-MT to five single-task (ST) baseline models, including three deep models (LSTM-ST, GRU-ST, Transformer-ST) and two machine learning models (GRU-ST, RF-ST), and performed ablation study to assess the contribution of important components in IOC-MT. Model discrimination was evaluated by AUROC and AUPRC, and model calibration was assessed by the calibration curve. The attention weight and adjustment coefficient were analyzed at both overall and individual level to show the AAM of IOC-MT.ResultsThe IOC-MT had comparable discrimination and calibration to LSTM-ST, GRU-ST and Transformer-ST for most organs under different gap windows in the internal and external validation, and obviously outperformed GRU-ST, RF-ST. The ablation study showed that the GAT, AAM and missing indicator could improve the overall performance of the model. Furthermore, the inter-organ correlation and prediction adjustment of IOC-MT were intuitive and comprehensible, and also had biological plausibility.ConclusionsThe IOC-MT is a promising MT model for dynamically predicting FD in six organ systems. It can capture inter-organ correlation and adjust the prediction for one organ based on aggregated information from the other organs.