Knowledge guided diagnosis prediction via graph spatial-temporal network

Predicting the future health conditions of patients based on Electronic Health Records (EHR) is an important research topic. Due to the temporal nature of EHR data, the major challenge is how to properly model the sequences of patient visits. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with attention mechanisms are widely employed to address this challenge, but often vulnerable to data insufficiency. Lately, predictive models with the guidance of medical knowledge have been proposed to solve this problem and achieve superior performance. Although these models learn reasonable embeddings (infused with knowledge) for clinical variables, they are not able to fully make use of the underlying information in the knowledge graph. To address this, we propose an end-to-end robust solution, namely Graph Neural networks based Diagnosis Prediction (GNDP), to predict future conditions for patients. Compared with existing methods, GNDP learns the spatial and temporal patterns from patients' sequential graph, in which the domain knowledge is naturally infused. We evaluate our GNDP model against a set of state-of-the-art methods on two real-world EHR datasets and the results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the baseline methods.