Online Critical-State Detection of Sepsis Among ICU Patients using Jensen-Shannon Divergence

Abstract: Sepsis is a severe medical condition caused by a dysregulated host response to infection that has a high incidence and mortality rate. Even with such a high-level occurrence rate, the detection and diagnosis of sepsis continues to pose a challenge. There is a crucial need to accurately forecast the onset of sepsis promptly while also identifying the specific physiologic anomalies that contribute to this prediction in an interpretable fashion. This study proposes a novel approach to quantitatively measure the difference between patients and a reference group using non-parametric probability distribution estimates and highlight when abnormalities emerge using a Jensen-Shannon divergence-based single sample analysis approach. We show that we can quantitatively distinguish between these two groups and offer a measurement of divergence in real time while simultaneously identifying specific physiologic factors contributing to patient outcomes. We demonstrate our approach on a real-world dataset of patients admitted to Atlanta, Georgia's Grady Hospital.