Time series forecasting of weight for diuretic dose adjustment using bidirectional long short-term memory

Abstract

Loop diuretics are prevailing drugs to manage fluid overload in heart failure. However, adjusting to loop diuretic doses is strenuous due to the lack of a diuretic guideline. Accordingly, we developed a novel clinician decision support system for adjusting loop diuretics dosage with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) algorithm using time-series EMRs. Weight measurements were used as the target to estimate fluid loss during diuretic therapy. We designed the TSFD-LSTM, a bi-directional LSTM model with an attention mechanism, to forecast weight change 48 h after heart failure patients were injected with loop diuretics. The model utilized 65 variables, including disease conditions, concurrent medications, laboratory results, vital signs, and physical measurements from EMRs. The framework processed four sequences simultaneously as inputs. An ablation study on attention mechanisms and a comparison with the transformer model as a baseline were conducted. The TSFD-LSTM outperformed the other models, achieving 85% predictive accuracy with MAE and MSE values of 0.56 and 1.45, respectively. Thus, the TSFD-LSTM model can aid in personalized loop diuretic treatment and prevent adverse drug events, contributing to improved healthcare efficacy for heart failure patients.