Several types of patients are hospitalized in intensive care units (ICU), such as patients with multiple outcomes of sepsis (i.e., sepsis, severe sepsis, sepsis shock, and organ failure) in many cases, multiple sepsis outcomes (i.e., the sequential multiple onsets of these outcomes and mortality). One-third of ICU patients suffer from some types of sepsis. Sepsis types may have temporal patterns of sequential occurrences of these outcomes, leading to further complications, including mortality. Therefore, clinicians may depend on their intuition when analyzing time-sensitive information to make several clinical decisions for predicting early the likelihood of more than one type of sepsis co-occurring. Most previous modeling studies have focused on exploring a single sepsis type rather than multiple sepsis outcomes. Moreover, most of them use machine learning techniques in their clinics that may not accurately predict such temporal patterns of co-occurrences among different sepsis outcomes. The Abdelrahman lab has developed many temporal solutions that have been used effectively in critical care settings. Our primary goal is to develop a novel temporal solution that leverages our prior preliminary results, MIMIC IV dataset, and advanced machine learning techniques to better extracting patterns of the changes in multiple sepsis outcomes. The proposed solution's impact is to support the clinicians with an understanding of multiple sepsis outcomes. This project entails collaborations between informatics researchers and clinical experts to identify challenges and propose relevant solutions. It will require the student selected for the project and lab students to exchange ideas and solve problems together.

SPUR 2021 Project

Dr. Abdelrahman has had more than a decade of mentoring approximately twenty-five undergraduate and fifteen graduate students. His goal is to gradually educate students about the basic concepts such that, eventually, they become completely independent in developing and validating their ideas. Therefore, he starts every project by setting up clear milestones with clear definitions of goals, input, and output. He meets with the involved students at the time of the first milestone to let them know the project details/team and discuss their next milestones. Based on these discussions, Dr. Abdelrahman sets up the time-intervals for the project’s regular meetings, informs the students how they should report their findings and communicate with each other, and suggests modifications of the milestone(s), if needed. For the next milestones, he assesses the students’ performances and identifies any challenges that need to be addressed. He also encourages students who have successfully solved their problems to develop new ideas. For those who have challenges, he meets with each student individually to understand their issues and find an adequate solution. If the solution requires any change in the student’s activities, Dr. Abdelrahman adapts the milestones to reflect the student’s skills and thoughts. As a mentor, he also encourages his lab students to share ideas, and he organizes social meetings so the students can interact outside the lab environment.