Early Diagnosis and Its Benefits in Sepsis Blood Purification Treatment

Sepsis is a progressive medical condition characterized as an uncontrolled inflammatory response, which is the leading cause of death in non-coronary intensive care units in the United States. In sepsis treatment, accurate and timely diagnosis is essential for allowing physicians to design appropriate therapeutic strategies at early stages, when therapies are usually the most effective and the least costly. To make an adequate diagnosis, physicians usually rely on manual inspection of a large amount of complex, high-dimensional longitudinal data. We use our recently published data mining method for extracting patterns from such data and show that these patterns can be used to assist physicians in providing early diagnosis. In conducted experiments, we showed that combination of early diagnosis and blood purification therapy can rescue more patients (52%) than standard approach for blood purification therapy (32%). We also propose a hybrid therapy model that combines strengths of early and standard approaches and further improves the percentage of rescued patients. Finally, by correctly classifying 98% of patients who didn´t need treatment, MSD method provides opportunity to reduce the total cost of treatments.