Using Artificial Intelligence to Unravel the Mysteries of Sepsis

In the United States, more than a quarter of a million people each year succumb to sepsis, and around the world it’s one in five.

Sepsis is a condition in which the immune system responds to an existing infection such as COVID-19 by turning on itself instead of fighting the germs.

Infections that lead to sepsis most often start in the lung, urinary tract, skin, or gastrointestinal tract. Without timely treatment, sepsis can rapidly lead to tissue damage, multi-organ failure, and death.

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health recently awarded Emory researchers $2.6 million to study the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to predict treatment effectiveness and outcomes for patients with sepsis. 

“The hope is to use AI in a new way so we can better see in an area where traditionally we have flown blind,” says Rishikesan Kamaleswaran, the assistant professor in Emory’s biomedical informatics department who leads the research.

Typically, AI approaches have largely focused on predicting sepsis from electronic medical records, which Kamaleswaran says suffer from many problems. “The data are not timely, significant portions are missing or wrong because of the manual process of entry, and the information often reflects individual and institutional biases, which all make it difficult to devise a treatment plan that can be replicated someplace else.”

The five-year study will tap into expertise from different disciplines at Emory including mathematics, computer science, and medicine to develop sophisticated tools that can analyze the data, identify patterns, and prescribe a course of action. 

“The use of AI and machine learning here are powerful mathematical constructs that when placed in the hands of a capable clinician, can become an efficient resource for improving patient care,” Kamaleswaran says