CAREER: Personalized Maternal Care Decision Support System for Underserved Populations

University Of Oklahoma Norman Campus, Norman OK

Investigators

Abstract

The rate of women dying in childbirth and pregnancy, maternal mortality, is recognized as a crucial indicator of population health, the status of women's health in the society, and the overall health of the healthcare system itself. However, the US has experienced a worrying increase in maternal mortality over the last two decades, resulting in the US reaching the highest rate among developed countries. Preeclampsia is a pregnancy complication related to high blood pressure. Each year, preeclampsia afflicts 8-10% of US pregnancies and can lead to maternal and/or neonatal death unless it is detected and treated in early stages of the pregnancy. It remains a challenge to identify women at higher risk of preeclampsia, as several factors, notably age, race, and the history of pre-pregnancy diseases, can contribute to developing the condition. This project will build innovative technologies to allow computers to understand and predict the likelihood of a woman developing preeclampsia during pregnancy, particularly among women from minority racial groups. Building such a system requires massive data, ranging from demographic to individual health records, to train the computers to predict preeclampsia. The main novelty of this project is in its capacity to learn from clinical data that are often imperfect, suffering from missing or incomplete records with possibly very little information on preeclampsia cases, and to remain accurate for all populations, when predicting the risk of preeclampsia. The technologies developed in this project will also have the potential to help build tools that can help in early detection of other diseases. This project investigates developing novel machine learning (ML)-based clinical decision aid tools for early detection of preeclampsia (PE). The main novelty of this project is in its capacity to effectively address several issues specific to learning from PE datasets that, if not addressed, continue to impede the clinical implementation of ML-based early detection of PE: (Challenge I) PE datasets often face inherent class imbalance; (Challenge II) Constructing reliable ML models for early PE detection necessitates mining large and diverse datasets, such as electronic health records, posing a significant challenge to the scalability of existing ML models; and (Challenge III) PE disproportionately affects different groups, turning the accuracy of such ML models into a medical concern due, and posing a challenge in adopting ML for disease detection. In response to these challenges, the investigator will (1) develop a new class of parameter-free classifiers to effectively address the errors resulting from class imbalance, thus eliminating the need for computationally expensive hyperparameter tuning, a common issue with cost-sensitive learning models for class imbalance; (2) develop a novel scalable classification method for learning from large-scale PE datasets through formulating the learning task as a sequential decision-making process, guiding data sampling in classification; and (3) develop a class of classifiers based on tractable optimization models that balance fairness and accuracy, as well as novel performance-fairness metrics for imbalanced data. The investigator further studies adapting the accurate ML model for online learning settings within a novel scalable framework that can handle massive data. Successful implementation of the proposed ML-based PE detection models will enhance identification of pregnant women at a high risk of preeclampsia, while reducing errors in relevant maternal health management systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.