MIMIC-Extract: a data extraction, preprocessing, and representation pipeline for MIMIC-III

Abstract

Machine learning for healthcare researchers face challenges to progress and reproducibility due to a lack of standardized processing frameworks for public datasets. We present MIMIC-Extract, an open source pipeline for transforming the raw electronic health record (EHR) data of critical care patients from the publicly-available MIMIC-III database into data structures that are directly usable in common time-series prediction pipelines. MIMIC-Extract addresses three challenges in making complex EHR data accessible to the broader machine learning community. First, MIMIC-Extract transforms raw vital sign and laboratory measurements into usable hourly time series, performing essential steps such as unit conversion, outlier handling, and aggregation of semantically similar features to reduce missingness and improve robustness. Second, MIMIC-Extract extracts and makes prediction of clinically-relevant targets possible, including outcomes such as mortality and length-of-stay as well as comprehensive hourly intervention signals for ventilators, vasopressors, and fluid therapies. Finally, the pipeline emphasizes reproducibility and extensibility to future research questions. We demonstrate the pipeline's effectiveness by developing several benchmark tasks for outcome and intervention forecasting and assessing the performance of competitive models.