Soft Phenotyping for Sepsis via EHR Time-aware Soft Clustering

Sepsis is one of the most serious hospital conditions associated with high mortality. Sepsis is the result of a dysregulated immune response to infection that can lead to multiple organ dysfunction and death. Due to the wide variability in the causes of sepsis, clinical presentation, and the recovery trajectories identifying sepsis sub-phenotypes is crucial to advance our understanding of sepsis characterization, identifying targeted treatments and optimal timing of interventions, and improving prognostication. Prior studies have described different sub-phenotypes of sepsis with organ-specific characteristics. These studies applied clustering algorithms to electronic health records (EHRs) to identify disease sub-phenotypes. However, prior approaches did not capture temporal information and made uncertain assumptions about the relationships between the sub-phenotypes for clustering procedures. We develop a time-aware soft clustering algorithm guided by clinical context to identify sepsis sub-phenotypes using data from the EHR. We identified six novel sepsis hybrid sub-phenotypes and evaluated them for medical plausibility. In addition, we built an early-warning sepsis prediction model using logistic regression. Our results suggest that these novel sepsis hybrid sub-phenotypes are promising to provide more precise information on the recovery trajectory which can be important to inform management decisions and sepsis prognosis.