Doctor AI: Predicting Clinical Events via Recurrent Neural Networks
This work addresses the challenge of predicting medical conditions and medications for patients using EHR data, representing an incremental advance in applying deep learning to healthcare.
The authors tackled the problem of predicting clinical events from electronic health records by developing Doctor AI, a recurrent neural network model that achieved up to 79% recall@30 for differential diagnosis on a test set of 260K patients over 8 years.
Leveraging large historical data in electronic health record (EHR), we developed Doctor AI, a generic predictive model that covers observed medical conditions and medication uses. Doctor AI is a temporal model using recurrent neural networks (RNN) and was developed and applied to longitudinal time stamped EHR data from 260K patients over 8 years. Encounter records (e.g. diagnosis codes, medication codes or procedure codes) were input to RNN to predict (all) the diagnosis and medication categories for a subsequent visit. Doctor AI assesses the history of patients to make multilabel predictions (one label for each diagnosis or medication category). Based on separate blind test set evaluation, Doctor AI can perform differential diagnosis with up to 79% recall@30, significantly higher than several baselines. Moreover, we demonstrate great generalizability of Doctor AI by adapting the resulting models from one institution to another without losing substantial accuracy.