An AdaBoost-based algorithm to detect hospital-acquired pressure injury in the presence of conflicting annotations

Hospital-acquired pressure injury is one of the most harmful events in clinical settings. Patients who do not receive early prevention and treatment can experience a significant financial burden and physical trauma. Several hospital-acquired pressure injury prediction algorithms have been developed to tackle this problem, but these models assume a consensus, gold-standard label (i.e., presence of pressure injury or not) is present for all training data. Existing definitions for identifying hospital-acquired pressure injuries are inconsistent due to the lack of high-quality documentation surrounding pressure injuries. To address this issue, we propose in this paper an ensemble-based algorithm that leverages truth inference methods to resolve label inconsistencies between various case definitions and the level of disagreements in annotations. Application of our method to MIMIC-III, a publicly available intensive care unit dataset, gives empirical results that illustrate the promise of learning a prediction model using truth inference-based labels and observed conflict among annotators.

Machine learning method using position-specific mutation based classification outperforms one hot coding for disease severity prediction in haemophilia 'A'

Haemophilia is an X-linked genetic disorder in which A and B types are the most common that occur due to absence or lack of protein factors VIII and IX, respectively. Severity of the disease depends on mutation. Available Machine Learning (ML) methods that predict the mutational severity by using traditional encoding approaches, generally have high time complexity and compromised accuracy. In this study, Haemophilia 'A' patient mutation dataset containing 7784 mutations was processed by the proposed Position-Specific Mutation (PSM) and One-Hot Encoding (OHE) technique to predict the disease severity. The dataset processed by PSM and OHE methods was analyzed and trained for classification of mutation severity level using various ML algorithms. Surprisingly, PSM outperformed OHE, both in terms of time efficiency and accuracy, with training and prediction time improvement in the range of approximately 91 to 98% and 80 to 99% respectively. The severity prediction accuracy also improved by using PSM with different ML algorithms.