Informed Clinical Decision Making using Deep Learning Specialization

This course will introduce MIMIC-III, which is the largest publicly Electronic Health Record (EHR) database available to benchmark machine learning algorithms. In particular, you will learn about the design of this relational database, what tools are available to query, extract and visualise descriptive analytics.

The schema and International Classification of Diseases coding is important to understand how to map research questions to data and how to extract key clinical outcomes in order to develop clinically useful machine learning algorithms.

Overview of the main principles of Deep Learning along with common architectures. Formulate the problem for time-series classification and apply it to vital signals such as ECG. Applying this methods in Electronic Health Records is challenging due to the missing values and the heterogeneity in EHR, which include both continuous, ordinal and categorical variables. Subsequently, explore imputation techniques and different encoding strategies to address these issues. Apply these approaches to formulate clinical prediction benchmarks derived from information available in MIMIC-III database.

This course will introduce the concepts of interpretability and explainability in machine learning applications. The learner will understand the difference between global, local, model-agnostic and model-specific explanations. State-of-the-art explainability methods such as Permutation Feature Importance (PFI), Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) and SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) are explained and applied in time-series classification. Subsequently, model-specific explanations such as Class-Activation Mapping (CAM) and Gradient-Weighted CAM are explained and implemented. The learners will understand axiomatic attributions and why they are important. Finally, attention mechanisms are going to be incorporated after Recurrent Layers and the attention weights will be visualised to produce local explanations of the model.

Machine learning systems used in Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) require further external validation, calibration analysis, assessment of bias and fairness. In this course, the main concepts of machine learning evaluation adopted in CDSS will be explained. Furthermore, decision curve analysis along with human-centred CDSS that need to be explainable will be discussed. Finally, privacy concerns of deep learning models and potential adversarial attacks will be presented along with the vision for a new generation of explainable and privacy-preserved CDSS.