Fusion of sequential visits and medical ontology for mortality prediction

Highlights

• To predict mortality with fusion of sequential visits and medical ontology.

• To enhance patient correlation and mitigate data scarcity with clinical knowledge.

• To introduce the ordinary differential equation to model irregular time series.

Abstract

The goal of mortality prediction task is to predict the future death risk of patients according to their previous Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR). The main challenge of mortality prediction is how to design an accurate and robust predictive model with sequential, multivariate, sparse and irregular EHR data. In addition, the performance of model may be affected by lack of sufficient information of some patients with rare diseases in EHRs. To address these challenges, we propose a model to fuse Sequential visits and Medical Ontology to predict patients’ death risk. SeMO not only learns reasonable embeddings for medical concepts from sequential and irregular visits, but also exploits medical ontology to improve the prediction performance. With integration of multivariate features, SeMO learns robust representations of medical codes, mitigating data insufficiency and insightful sequential dependencies among patient’s visits. Experimental results on real world datasets prove that the proposed SeMO improves the prediction performance compared with the baseline approaches. Our model achieves an precision of up to 0.975. Compared with RNN, the precision has been improved up to 2.204%.