Scientific article
English

ICU-TSB : A Benchmark for Temporal Patient Representation Learning for Unsupervised Stratification into Patient Cohorts

Publication date2025-07-04
Abstract

Patient stratification identifying clinically meaningful subgroups is essential for advancing personalized medicine through improved diagnostics and treatment strategies. Electronic health records (EHRs), particularly those from intensive care units (ICUs), contain rich temporal clinical data that can be leveraged for this purpose. In this work, we introduce ICU-TSB (Temporal Stratification Benchmark), the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating patient stratification based on temporal patient representation learning using three publicly available ICU EHR datasets. A key contribution of our benchmark is a novel hierarchical evaluation framework utilizing disease taxonomies to measure the alignment of discovered clusters with clinically validated disease groupings. In our experiments with ICU-TSB, we compared statistical methods and several recurrent neural networks, including LSTM and GRU, for their ability to generate effective patient representations for subsequent clustering of patient trajectories. Our results demonstrate that temporal representation learning can rediscover clinically meaningful patient cohorts; nevertheless, it remains a challenging task, with v-measuring varying from up to 0.46 at the top level of the taxonomy to up to 0.40 at the lowest level. To further enhance the practical utility of our findings, we also evaluate multiple strategies for assigning interpretable labels to the identified clusters. The experiments and benchmark are fully reproducible and available at https://github.com/ds4dh/CBMS2025stratification.

Keywords
  • Temporal representation learning
  • Patient electronic health records modelling
  • Time-series
  • Patient stratification
Citation (ISO format)
PROIOS, Dimitrios et al. ICU-TSB : A Benchmark for Temporal Patient Representation Learning for Unsupervised Stratification into Patient Cohorts. In: Proceedings - IEEE Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems, 2025, p. 65–70. doi: 10.1109/CBMS65348.2025.00022
Main files (1)
Article (Published version) - 10.1109/CBMS65348.2025.00022
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Identifiers
Additional URL for this publicationhttps://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11058737
Journal ISSN1063-7125
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Technical informations

Creation06/07/2025 17:35:12
First validation12/08/2025 09:19:08
Update12/08/2025 09:19:08
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