Acute ischaemic stroke prediction from physiological time series patterns

BACKGROUND: Stroke is one of the major diseases with human mortality. Recent clinical research has indicated that early changes in common physiological variables represent a potential therapeutic target, thus the manipulation of these variables may eventually yield an effective way to optimise stroke recovery. AIMS: We examined correlations between physiological parameters of patients during the first 48 hours after a stroke, and their stroke outcomes after three months. We wanted to discover physiological determinants that could be used to improve health outcomes by supporting the medical decisions that need to be made early on a patient's stroke experience. METHOD: We applied regression-based machine learning techniques to build a prediction algorithm that can forecast threemonth outcomes from initial physiological time series data during the first 48 hours after stroke. In our method, not only did we use statistical characteristics as traditional prediction features, but we also adopted trend patterns of time series data as new key features. RESULTS: We tested our prediction method on a real physiological data set of stroke patients. The experiment results revealed an average high precision rate: 90%. We also tested prediction methods only considering statistical characteristics of physiological data, and concluded an average precision rate: 71%. CONCLUSION: We demonstrated that using trend pattern features in prediction methods improved the accuracy of stroke outcome prediction. Therefore, trend patterns of physiological time series data have an important role in the early treatment of patients with acute ischaemic stroke.