Medical & biological engineering & computing
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Med Biol Eng Comput · Jul 2007
Predicting survival in critical patients by use of body temperature regularity measurement based on approximate entropy.
Body temperature is a classical diagnostic tool for a number of diseases. However, it is usually employed as a plain binary classification function (febrile or not febrile), and therefore its diagnostic power has not been fully developed. In this paper, we describe how body temperature regularity can be used for diagnosis. ⋯ Our results indicate there is a correlation between the patient's condition and the regularity of the body temperature. This finding enabled us to design a classifier for two outcomes (survival or death) and test it on a dataset including 36 subjects. The classifier achieved an accuracy of 72%.