Fusion of Dynamic Hypergraph and Clinical Event for Sequential Diagnosis Prediction
Xin Zhang, Xueping Peng, Hongjiao Guan, Long Zhao, Xinxiao Qiao, Wenpeng Lü · 2023
Sequential diagnosis prediction (SDP) is a challenging task, aiming to predict patients’ future diagnoses based on their historical medical records. While methods based on graph neural networks (GNNs) have proven successful for this task, they typically focus on modeling pairwise diseases using a global disease combination graph. However, these approaches neglect the fine-grained higher-order relations among persistent and emerging diseases within a single visit, which may contain crucial clues to predict the next diagnosis. Additionally, they fail to fully leverage patient-related clinical information present in electronic health records (EHRs). To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel approach called the fusion of Dynamic Hypergraph and Clinical Event (DHCE) for sequential diagnosis prediction. The proposed method aims to exploit the fine-grained higher-order relations among diagnoses within a visit and leverage clinical event information from EHRs to improve the accuracy of predicting the next diagnosis. Specifically, DHCE categorizes diagnoses within a single visit in a fine-grained granularity into persistent and emerging categories based on a patient’s historical diagnoses. It then constructs dynamic hypergraphs to capture higher-order disease relations within each visit. Next, we design a transition function to extract the transitional context from previous visits in order to generate the visit representation. Furthermore, to fully leverage patient-related clinical events in a visit, we utilize Bio-Clinical BERT to encode them and generate the clinical event representation for each visit. Finally, we combine the visit representation and event representation to generate a comprehensive patient representation, which is then used to predict the patient’s next diagnosis. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets consistently demonstrate that DHCE outperforms state-of-the-art methods1.