Shunpan Liang

Xiang Li, Shunpan Liang, Yulei Hou et al.

With the growing imbalance between limited medical resources and escalating demands, AI-based clinical tasks have become paramount. As a sub-domain, medication recommendation aims to amalgamate longitudinal patient history with medical knowledge, assisting physicians in prescribing safer and more accurate medication combinations. Existing works ignore the inherent long-tailed distribution of medical data, have uneven learning strengths for hot and sparse data, and fail to balance safety and accuracy. To address the above limitations, we propose StratMed, which introduces a stratification strategy that overcomes the long-tailed problem and achieves fuller learning of sparse data. It also utilizes a dual-property network to address the issue of mutual constraints on the safety and accuracy of medication combinations, synergistically enhancing these two properties. Specifically, we construct a pre-training method using deep learning networks to obtain medication and disease representations. After that, we design a pyramid-like stratification method based on relevance to strengthen the expressiveness of sparse data. Based on this relevance, we design two graph structures to express medication safety and precision at the same level to obtain patient representations. Finally, the patient's historical clinical information is fitted to generate medication combinations for the current health condition. We employed the MIMIC-III dataset to evaluate our model against state-of-the-art methods in three aspects comprehensively. Compared to the sub-optimal baseline model, our model reduces safety risk by 15.08\%, improves accuracy by 0.36\%, and reduces training time consumption by 81.66\%.

Xiang Li, Shunpan Liang, Yu Lei et al.

Medication recommendation systems are developed to recommend suitable medications tailored to specific patient. Previous researches primarily focus on learning medication representations, which have yielded notable advances. However, these methods are limited to capturing personalized patient representations due to the following primary limitations: (i) unable to capture the differences in the impact of diseases/procedures on patients across various patient health states; (ii) fail to model the direct causal relationships between medications and specific health state of patients, resulting in an inability to determine which specific disease each medication is treating. To address these limitations, we propose CausalMed, a patient health state-centric model capable of enhancing the personalization of patient representations. Specifically, CausalMed first captures the causal relationship between diseases/procedures and medications through causal discovery and evaluates their causal effects. Building upon this, CausalMed focuses on analyzing the health state of patients, capturing the dynamic differences of diseases/procedures in different health states of patients, and transforming diseases/procedures into medications on direct causal relationships. Ultimately, CausalMed integrates information from longitudinal visits to recommend medication combinations. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our method learns more personalized patient representation and outperforms state-of-the-art models in accuracy and safety.

Shunpan Liang, Xiang Li, Shi Mu et al.

Medication recommendation aims to integrate patients' long-term health records to provide accurate and safe medication combinations for specific health states. Existing methods often fail to deeply explore the true causal relationships between diseases/procedures and medications, resulting in biased recommendations. Additionally, in medication representation learning, the relationships between information at different granularities of medications, coarse-grained (medication itself) and fine-grained (molecular level), are not effectively integrated, leading to biases in representation learning. To address these limitations, we propose the Causal Inference-driven Dual-Granularity Medication Recommendation method (CIDGMed). Our approach leverages causal inference to uncover the relationships between diseases/procedures and medications, thereby enhancing the rationality and interpretability of recommendations. By integrating coarse-grained medication effects with fine-grained molecular structure information, CIDGMed provides a comprehensive representation of medications. Additionally, we employ a bias correction model during the prediction phase to further refine recommendations, ensuring both accuracy and safety. Through extensive experiments, CIDGMed significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art models across multiple metrics, achieving a 2.54% increase in accuracy, a 3.65% reduction in side effects, and a 39.42% improvement in time efficiency. Additionally, we demonstrate the rationale of CIDGMed through a case study.

Shunpan Liang, Junjie Zhao, Chen Li et al.

Multi-behavioral recommendation optimizes user experiences by providing users with more accurate choices based on their diverse behaviors, such as view, add to cart, and purchase. Current studies on multi-behavioral recommendation mainly explore the connections and differences between multi-behaviors from an implicit perspective. Specifically, they directly model those relations using black-box neural networks. In fact, users' interactions with items under different behaviors are driven by distinct intents. For instance, when users view products, they tend to pay greater attention to information such as ratings and brands. However, when it comes to the purchasing phase, users become more price-conscious. To tackle this challenge and data sparsity problem in the multi-behavioral recommendation, we propose a novel model: Knowledge-Aware Multi-Intent Contrastive Learning (KAMCL) model. This model uses relationships in the knowledge graph to construct intents, aiming to mine the connections between users' multi-behaviors from the perspective of intents to achieve more accurate recommendations. KAMCL is equipped with two contrastive learning schemes to alleviate the data scarcity problem and further enhance user representations. Extensive experiments on three real datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model.

Xiang Li, Haixu Ma, Guanyong Wu et al.

Medication recommendation is crucial in healthcare, offering effective treatments based on patient's electronic health records (EHR). Previous studies show that integrating more medication-related knowledge improves medication representation accuracy. However, not all medications encompass multiple types of knowledge data simultaneously. For instance, some medications provide only textual descriptions without structured data. This imbalance in data availability limits the performance of existing models, a challenge we term the "bucket effect" in medication recommendation. Our data analysis uncovers the severity of the "bucket effect" in medication recommendation. To fill this gap, we introduce a cross-modal medication encoder capable of seamlessly aligning data from different modalities and propose a medication recommendation framework to integrate Multiple types of Knowledge, named MKMed. Specifically, we first pre-train a cross-modal encoder with contrastive learning on five knowledge modalities, aligning them into a unified space. Then, we combine the multi-knowledge medication representations with patient records for recommendations. Extensive experiments on the MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV datasets demonstrate that MKMed mitigates the "bucket effect" in data, and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in recommendation accuracy and safety.