Early prediction of acute kidney injury in critical care setting using clinical notes and structured multivariate physiological measurements

The onset of acute kidney injury (AKI) during an intensive care unit (ICU) admission is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Developing novel methods to identify early AKI onset is of critical importance in preventing or reducing AKI complications. We built and applied multiple machine learning models to integrate clinical notes and structured physiological measurements and estimate the risk of new AKI onset using the MIMIC-III database. From the clinical notes, we generated clinically meaningful word representations and embeddings. Four supervised learning classifiers and mixed-feature deep learning architecture were used to construct prediction models. The best configurations consistently utilized both structured and unstructured clinical features and yielded competitive AUCs above 0.83. Our work suggests that integrating structured and unstructured clinical features can be effectively applied to assist clinicians in identifying the risk of incident AKI onset in critically-ill patients upon admission to the ICU.