Generating Synthetic Mixed-type Longitudinal Electronic Health Records for Artificial Intelligent Applications
This work addresses privacy and data-sharing barriers in healthcare AI by enabling synthetic data generation for resource-limited settings, though it is incremental as it builds on existing GAN methods to handle mixed data types.
The authors tackled the problem of generating synthetic electronic health records (EHRs) to address privacy concerns and data limitations, proposing EHR-M-GAN, a generative adversarial network that synthesizes mixed-type longitudinal EHR data, validated on three ICU databases with 141,488 patients and showing improved prediction model performance when augmented with synthetic data.
The recent availability of electronic health records (EHRs) have provided enormous opportunities to develop artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. However, patient privacy has become a major concern that limits data sharing across hospital settings and subsequently hinders the advances in AI. Synthetic data, which benefits from the development and proliferation of generative models, has served as a promising substitute for real patient EHR data. However, the current generative models are limited as they only generate single type of clinical data for a synthetic patient, i.e., either continuous-valued or discrete-valued. To mimic the nature of clinical decision-making which encompasses various data types/sources, in this study, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) entitled EHR-M-GAN which simultaneously synthesizes mixed-type timeseries EHR data. EHR-M-GAN is capable of capturing the multidimensional, heterogeneous, and correlated temporal dynamics in patient trajectories. We have validated EHR-M-GAN on three publicly-available intensive care unit databases with records from a total of 141,488 unique patients, and performed privacy risk evaluation of the proposed model. EHR-M-GAN has demonstrated its superiority over state-of-the-art benchmarks for synthesizing clinical timeseries with high fidelity, while addressing the limitations regarding data types and dimensionality in the current generative models. Notably, prediction models for outcomes of intensive care performed significantly better when training data was augmented with the addition of EHR-M-GAN-generated timeseries. EHR-M-GAN may have use in developing AI algorithms in resource-limited settings, lowering the barrier for data acquisition while preserving patient privacy.