Emma Children's Hospital

Emma Children’s Hospital

Emma Children’s Hospital is a hospital located in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and is part of the Amsterdam UMC. During the thesis period for the Masters degree a collaboration was set up between the UvA and Emma Children’s Hospital. Children hospitalized at the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) during their first year of life were surveyed and examined 6-12 years after their admision. The aim of this retrospective study is to find possible relations between clinical PICU data and neurocognitive outcome in later stages of life.

Project details

To assess the severity of neurocognitive impairment in children aged 6-12 years with a history of viral lower respiratory tract infections during infancy, hundreds of different parameters were measured. The clinical data includes survey, laboratory, mechanical ventilation and PICU-related data.

A first selection of these parameters was made based on expert knowledge from both literature and PICU-doctors from Emma Children’s hospital. 175 different studies on similar topics were found and analyzed to discover:

• Which features were incorporated in their studies
• Which type of IC was investigated
• Which type of model was used
• Whether machine learning was involved
• Whether the feature is positively/negatively associated with the outcome

With the parameters from these findings, three machine learning models were written. Linear regression as a baseline model, regression trees and k-nearest neighbor as “more complex” models. Different techniques were used in the process such as automated hyperparameter optimization, bagging, self-written automated backward stepwise regression and bootstrapping.

The results of the linear regression and the regression trees show promising and similar results. A successfull pipeline is written in order to find the relationships between contributing factors from the clinical data and neurocognitive outcome of the impaired children.

The thesis is expected to be published by the end of this year.