“Sepsis is silent but deadly—here’s how data and biomarkers can help us spot it early.”
- Sindhurathi Mathivanan
- Sep 25
- 2 min read
My journey through Sprint-1: turning medical data into insights that could save lives.
What is Sepsis?
Sepsis is the body’s extreme reaction to an infection that damages its own organs and can quickly become life-threatening.
Reason for Sepsis:
Common infections that trigger sepsis include pneumonia, urinary tract infections, abdominal infections, and bloodstream infections.
Why Sepsis is a Life-threatening condition?
Sepsis is a life-threatening condition because it is not just an infection. It’s the body’s overreaction to infection. Instead of fighting only the germs, the defense system turns harmful, leading to shock, organ failure, and potentially death without urgent treatment.
Why we need to predict sepsis early?
If Sepsis develops fully, it becomes very hard to treat and the chances of death go quickly. By predicting it early means, within first 3 hours of early prediction and treatment, we can save lives and start treatment before the patient crashes and protect the high-risk patients’ groups like newborns, elderly, cancer patients, diabetics, ICU patients with catheters or ventilators by monitoring them closely and treating them with invasive treatments. We can save lives and reduce the mortality rate and hospital resource costs also.
Dataset Overview:
Sepsis dataset has 1.5 Million patient records which has the hourly lab readings of the respective biomarkers(related) which includes 45 features divided under Demographics, Vital Signs, Laboratory measures and Outcomes. We analyzed all these data measures under 6 sprints with assigned tasks. Here, I’d like to share my journey and learnings from working on the Sepsis dataset.
Assigned Biomarkers: BUN and Creatinine
Creatinine:
Creatinine is a chemical discharge of creatine which body uses for muscle energy. It is removed from the blood by kidneys. Creatinine levels indicate how the kidney is working to remove the waste from blood.
IDEAL RANGE:
MEN: 0.7-1.3 mg/dL
WOMEN:0.6-1.1 mg/dL
Elevated Creatinine levels indicate Acute Kidney Injury (AKI), a serious complication. It has increased mortality and longer hospital stays.
BUN-Blood Urea Nitrogen:
It is a type of blood test which predicts the amount of urea nitrogen in your blood.
Urea Nitrogen is a drainage or dross or waste material produced when liver is breaking down the protein intake from food and it is passed through the blood to kidney. Kidney filters the urea nitrogen from the blood which is pee(urine).
IDEAL RANGE:
NORMAL:6-24 mg/dL
CHILDREN(1-17yrs):7-20 mg/dL
WOMEN:6-21 mg/dL
MEN:8-24 mg/dL
BUN levels are the key indicator of the kidney function.
Elevated BUN levels cause Kidney Dysfunction, dehydration, increased Protein Breakdown (Catabolism) which results in increased Mortality Rate.
BCR-BUN and Creatinine Ratio:
BUN and Creatinine levels can be measured together as a single test value, named as BCR (BUN and Creatinine Ratio) and reliable measure to detect the Kidney Dysfunction in Sepsis.
It is calculated through this formula, BUN (mg/dL)/Creatinine(mg/dL) = BCR (BUN and Creatinine Ratio).
A Higher Ratio (above 20:1) states dehydration, kidney problems and internal bleeding (in some cases) where as a Lower Ratio states liver and malnutrition problems.
BCR is a reliable test to predict the Mortality Rate of the Patients in SEPSIS.
Thank you for reading my first blog.
Coming soon: Sepsis Sprint-2 and a visualization that caught everyone’s eye.
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