A Diffusion Model with Contrastive Learning for ICU False Arrhythmia Alarm Reduction

The high rate of false arrhythmia alarms in intensive care units (ICUs) can negatively impact patient care and lead to slow staff response time due to alarm fatigue. To reduce false alarms in ICUs, previous works proposed conventional supervised learning methods which have inherent limitations in dealing with high-dimensional, sparse, unbalanced, and limited data. We propose a deep generative approach based on the conditional denoising diffusion model to detect false arrhythmia alarms in the ICUs. Our approach generates predictions that simulate waveforms of a patient under actual arrhythmia events conditioning on the patient's past waveform data, and uses the distance between the generated and the observed samples to classify the alarm. We design a network with residual links and self-attention mechanism to capture long-term dependencies in signal sequences, and leverage the contrastive learning mechanism to maximize distances between true and false arrhythmia alarms. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the MIMIC II arrhythmia dataset for detecting false alarms in both retrospective and real-time settings.