DECAF: An interpretable deep cascading framework for ICU mortality prediction

Medical risk detection is an important topic and a challenging task to improve the performance of clinical practices in Intensive Care Units (ICU). Although many bio-statistical learning and deep learning approaches have provided patient-specific mortality predictions, these existing methods lack interpretability that is crucial to gain adequate insight on why such predictions would work. In this paper, we introduce cascading theory to model the physiological domino effect and provide a novel approach to dynamically simulate the deterioration of patients' conditions. We propose a general DEep CAscading Framework (DECAF) to predict the potential risks of all physiological functions at each clinical stage. Compared with other feature-based and/or score-based models, our approach has a range of desirable properties, such as being interpretable, applicable with multi prediction tasks, and learnable from medical common sense and/or clinical experience knowledge. Experiments on a medical dataset (MIMIC-III) of 21,828 ICU patients show that DECAF reaches up to 89.30 % on AUROC, which surpasses the best competing methods for mortality prediction.