SepsisLens: Structure-Preserving Sequence Modelling for Decomposable Early Sepsis Warning

Yikun Ou, Wei Li

Early sepsis warning from ICU records can be cast as a structure-preserving prediction problem. A model needs to detect deterioration from irregular measurements while keeping each alert connected to the physiological signals that support it. Many temporal models fuse clinical variables into a patient-level representation, supporting scalar risk prediction but weakening the structure needed for clinical decomposition. We present SepsisLens, which preserves variable-indexed temporal states until risk composition. Observation-aware representations encode each variable's dynamics and measurement history, while a shared temporal encoder models each trajectory without collapsing the variable axis. The StructuredRiskHead composes multi-horizon risk from explicit variable-level and organ-level components. We evaluate SepsisLens on three public ICU cohorts and one private-hospital cohort under a common pre-onset protocol. SepsisLens achieves strong discrimination on all four cohorts and lower alert burden at matched event recall on MIMIC-IV. Structural ablations support the design, while input-side masking shows that the ranked components reflect variables with greater influence on…