Early Prediction of Sepsis From Clinical Data: The PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2019

Sepsis is a major public health concern with significant morbidity, mortality, and healthcare expenses. Early detection and antibiotic treatment of sepsis improve outcomes. However, although professional critical care societies have proposed new clinical criteria that aid sepsis recognition, the fundamental need for early detection and treatment remains unmet. In response, researchers have proposed algorithms for early sepsis detection, but directly comparing such methods has not been possible because of different patient cohorts, clinical variables and sepsis criteria, prediction tasks, evaluation metrics, and other differences. To address these issues, the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2019 facilitated the development of automated, open-source algorithms for the early detection of sepsis from clinical data. DESIGN: Participants submitted containerized algorithms to a cloud-based testing environment, where we graded entries for their binary classification performance using a novel clinical utility-based evaluation metric. We designed this scoring function specifically for the Challenge to reward algorithms for early predictions and penalize them for late or missed predictions and for false alarms. SETTING: ICUs in three separate hospital systems. We shared data from two systems publicly and sequestered data from all three systems for scoring. PATIENTS: We sourced over 60,000 ICU patients with up to 40 clinical variables for each hour of a patient’s ICU stay. We applied Sepsis-3 clinical criteria for sepsis onset. INTERVENTIONS: None. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: A total of 104 groups from academia and industry participated, contributing 853 submissions. Furthermore, 90 abstracts based on Challenge entries were accepted for presentation at Computing in Cardiology. CONCLUSIONS: Diverse computational approaches predict the onset of sepsis several hours before clinical recognition, but generalizability to different hospital systems remains a challenge.