NECA：面向多时间跨度ICU恶化预测的邻居事件曲线增强
NECA: Neighbor Event Curve Augmentation for Multi-Horizon ICU Deterioration Prediction
Chenyang Wang, Jiawei Theresa Tang, Xinran Liu, Xinyu Lu, Xulei Yang
AI 速览：NECA 是一种与模型无关的方法：它检索早期窗口特征相似的历史患者，并将其后续器官功能障碍事件的发生时间转换为多时间跨度的累积事件曲线特征，再与原始患者表示拼接，供下游预测器使用。
Early prediction of ICU organ dysfunction events supports timely clinical monitoring and intervention, but estimating short-term organ-specific risk from early ICU records remains challenging due to irregular measurements, heterogeneous clinical variables, and the need to predict risk across multiple future horizons. Existing supervised models usually treat each patient as an isolated sample and do not explicitly use the observed event timing of similar historical patients. We propose Neighbor Event-Curve Augmentation (NECA), a model-agnostic method that retrieves training-set patients with similar early-window profiles and converts their subsequent organ dysfunction event onset times into cumulative event-curve features over 6h, 12h, 24h, and 42h. These features are concatenated with the original patient representation and used by standard downstream predictors. On PhysioNet 2012 and a 4,000-stay MIMIC-IV subset, NECA improves average PR-AUC and ROC-AUC across four organ dysfunction event tasks and seven supervised learners. The largest gain appears for neurological dysfunction events, where task-level average PR-AUC increases from 0.461 to 0.557 on PhysioNet 2012. Ablations show that clinically meaningful retrieval and horizon-specific neighbor risk drive most of the improvement, while the full cumulative curve adds task-dependent temporal context. These results support similar-patient event timing as a structured temporal risk signal for ICU organ dysfunction event prediction. The source code will be publicly released upon acceptance of this paper.