Sepsis presents a significant challenge to healthcare providers during critical care scenarios such as within an intensive care unit. The prognosis of the onset of severe septic shock results in significant increases in mortality rate, length of stay and readmission rates. Continual advancements in health informatics data allows for applications within the machine learning field to predict sepsis onset in a timely manner, allowing for effective preventative intervention of severe septic shock. A novel deep learning application is proposed to provide effective prediction of sepsis onset by up to six hours prior, involving the use of novel concepts such as a boosted cascading training methodology and adjustable margin hinge loss function. The proposed methodology provides statistically significant improvements to that of current machine learning based modelling applications based off the Physionet Computing in Cardiology 2019 challenge. Results show test F1 scores of 0.420, a significant improvement of 0.281 as compared to the next best challenger results.

The achievement of neural networks in a variety of applications is accompanied by a dramatic increase in computational costs and memory requirements. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to simultaneously identify the critical neurons and prune the model during training without involving any pre-training or fine-tuning procedures. Unlike existing methods, which accomplish this task in a greedy fashion, we propose a majority voting technique to compare the activation values among neurons and assign a voting score to quantitatively evaluate their importance.This mechanism helps to effectively reduce model complexity by eliminating the less influential neurons and aims to determine a subset of the whole model that can represent the reference model with much fewer parameters within the training process. Experimental results show that majority voting efficiently compresses the network with no drop in model accuracy, pruning more than 79\% of the original model parameters on CIFAR10 and more than 91\% of the original parameters on MNIST. Moreover, we show that with our proposed method, sparse models can be further pruned into even smaller models by removing more than 60\% of the parameters, whilst preserving the reference model accuracy.

There has been growing interest recently in using machine learning techniques as an aid in clinical medicine. Machine learning offers a range of classification algorithms which can be applied to medical data to aid in making clinical predictions. Recent studies have demonstrated the high predictive accuracy of various classification algorithms applied to clinical data. Several studies have already been conducted in diagnosing or predicting chronic kidney disease at various stages using different sets of variables. In this study we are investigating the use machine learning techniques with blood test data. Such a system could aid renal teams in making recommendations to primary care general practitioners to refer patients to secondary care where patients may benefit from earlier specialist assessment and medical intervention. We are able to achieve an overall accuracy of 88.48\% using logistic regression, 87.12\% using ANN and 85.29\% using SVM. ANNs performed with the highest sensitivity at 89.74\% compared to 86.67\% for logistic regression and 85.51\% for SVM.