Predicting length of stay in ICU and mortality with temporal dilated separable convolution and context-aware feature fusion

In healthcare, Intensive Care Unit (ICU) bed management is a necessary task because of the limited budget and resources. Predicting the remaining Length of Stay (LoS) in ICU and mortality can assist clinicians in managing ICU beds efficiently. This study proposes a deep learning method based on several successive Temporal Dilated Separable Convolution with Context-Aware Feature Fusion (TDSC-CAFF) modules, and a multi-view and multi -scale feature fusion for predicting the remaining LoS and mortality risk for ICU patients. In each TDSC-CAFF module, temporal dilated separable convolution is used to encode each feature separately, and context-aware feature fusion is proposed to capture comprehensive and context-aware feature representations from the input time-series features, static demographics, and the output of the last TDSC-CAFF module. The CAFF outputs of each module are accumulated to achieve multi-scale representations with different receptive fields. The outputs of TDSC and CAFF are concatenated with skip connection from the output of the last module and the original time-series input. The concatenated features are processed by the proposed Point-Wise convolution-based Attention (PWAtt) that captures the inter-feature context to generate the final temporal features. Finally, the final temporal features, the accumulated multi-scale features, the encoded diagnosis, and static demographic features are fused and then processed by fully connected layers to obtain prediction results. We evaluate our proposed method on two publicly available datasets: eICU and MIMIC-IV v1.0 for LoS and mortality prediction tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a mean squared log error of 0.07 and 0.08 for LoS prediction, and an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve of 0.909 and 0.926 for mortality prediction, on eICU and MIMIC-IV v1.0 datasets, respectively, which outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.