Modeling electronic health record data using a knowledge-graph-embedded topic model
This work addresses the challenge of effectively analyzing large-scale EHR data for healthcare applications, representing an incremental improvement by integrating knowledge graphs into topic modeling.
The authors tackled the problem of extracting clinical knowledge from sparse and noisy electronic health record (EHR) data by developing KG-ETM, a knowledge-graph-embedded topic model, which demonstrated superior performance in EHR reconstruction and drug imputation tasks on a dataset of over 1 million patients.
The rapid growth of electronic health record (EHR) datasets opens up promising opportunities to understand human diseases in a systematic way. However, effective extraction of clinical knowledge from the EHR data has been hindered by its sparsity and noisy information. We present KG-ETM, an end-to-end knowledge graph-based multimodal embedded topic model. KG-ETM distills latent disease topics from EHR data by learning the embedding from the medical knowledge graphs. We applied KG-ETM to a large-scale EHR dataset consisting of over 1 million patients. We evaluated its performance based on EHR reconstruction and drug imputation. KG-ETM demonstrated superior performance over the alternative methods on both tasks. Moreover, our model learned clinically meaningful graph-informed embedding of the EHR codes. In additional, our model is also able to discover interpretable and accurate patient representations for patient stratification and drug recommendations.