Abstract
BACKGROUND: The use of SIRS and SOFA criteria in diagnosing sepsis among patients has been characterized by increasingly growing criticism. Indeed, the definition of sepsis has attracted significant controversy in history across medical and academic realms. METHODS: The study used the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care-III (MIMIC-III) database in assessing the effectiveness of the SIRS and SOFA diagnostic criteria. It ascertained the severity and specificity of sepsis infection in ICU patients. The Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care-III (MIMIC-III) database was established by the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and MIT's Computational Physiology Laboratory. The database is a voluminous single-center database containing information pertaining to 38,000 adults who were admitted to the BIDMC in the 11 years leading up to 2012. The identification of patients with sepsis was conducted using the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10-CM) diagnosis codes. RESULTS: The analysis of data for this study was based on the chi-square test, which is significant in comparing the specificity, mortality, and sensitivity of the data. The process of screening the MIMIC-III database resulted in the identification of 21,368 patients with infections from the hospital admissions in the database. The results also indicate a significantly higher mortality rate within 28 days of admission in sepsis-3 patients compared with sepsis-1. In this experiment, we limited the study period to 28 days to restrict the potential of mortality caused by other factors. Additionally, we evaluated the clinical factors associated with the sepsis-1 or sepsis-3 and found out similar results in the analysis for sepsis-1 and sepsis-3. CONCLUSIONS: The study results also portray numerous challenges in using the sepsis-3 criteria as a diagnostic tool. In particular, the ICD-10-CM diagnosis approach was limiting because it inhibited the measure of uncertainty of infection present at the beginning of the two diagnostic criteria of sepsis-1 and sepsis-3.