ricu: R's Interface to Intensive Care Data

Abstract: Providing computational infrastructure for handling diverse intensive care unit (ICU) datasets, the R package 'ricu' enables writing dataset-agnostic analysis code, thereby facilitating multi-center training and validation of machine learning models. The package is designed with an emphasis on extensibility both to new datasets as well as clinical data concepts, and currently supports the loading of around 100 patient variables corresponding to a total of 319,402 ICU admissions from 4 data sources collected in Europe and the United States. By allowing for the addition of user-specified medical concepts and data sources the aim of 'ricu' is to foster robust, data-based intensive care research, allowing the user to externally validate their method or conclusion with relative ease, and in turn facilitating reproducible and therefore transparent work in this field.