Multimodal predictor of neurodevelopmental outcome in newborns with hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy

Abstract

Automated multimodal prediction of outcome in newborns with hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy is investigated in this work. Routine clinical measures and 1h EEG and ECG recordings 24h after birth were obtained from 38 newborns with different grades of HIE. Each newborn was reassessed at 24 months to establish their neurodevelopmental outcome. A set of multimodal features is extracted from the clinical, heart rate and EEG measures and is fed into a support vector machine classifier. The performance is reported with the statistically most unbiased leave-one-patient-out performance assessment routine. A subset of informative features, whose rankings are consistent across all patients, is identified. The best performance is obtained using a subset of 9 EEG, 2h and 1 clinical feature, leading to an area under the ROC curve of 87% and accuracy of 84% which compares favourably to the EEG-based clinical outcome prediction, previously reported on the same data. The work presents a promising step towards the use of multimodal data in building an objective decision support tool for clinical prediction of neurodevelopmental outcome in newborns with hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy.