A General Framework for Diagnosis Prediction via Incorporating Medical Code Descriptions

Diagnosis prediction aims to predict the future health status of patients according to their historical visit records, which is an important yet challenging task in healthcare informatics. Existing diagnosis prediction approaches mainly employ recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with attention mechanisms to make predictions. However, these approaches ignore the importance of code descriptions, i.e., the medical definitions of diagnosis codes. We believe that taking diagnosis code descriptions into account can help the state-of-the-art models not only to learn meaningful code representations, but also to improve the predictive performance. Thus, in this paper, we propose a simple, but general diagnosis prediction framework, which includes two basic components: diagnosis code embedding and predictive model. To learn the interpretable code embeddings, we apply convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to model medical descriptions of diagnosis codes extracted from online medical websites. The learned medical embedding matrix is used to embed the input visits into vector representations, which are fed into the predictive models. Any existing diagnosis prediction approach (referred to as the base model) can be cast into the proposed framework as the predictive model (called the enhanced model). We conduct experiments on two real medical datasets: the MIMIC-III dataset and the Heart Failure claim dataset. Experimental results show that the enhanced diagnosis prediction approaches significantly improve the prediction performance.