No Arabic abstract
One major impediment to the wider use of deep learning for clinical decision making is the difficulty of assigning a level of confidence to model predictions. Currently, deep Bayesian neural networks and sparse Gaussian processes are the main two scalable uncertainty estimation methods. However, deep Bayesian neural network suffers from lack of expressiveness, and more expressive models such as deep kernel learning, which is an extension of sparse Gaussian process, captures only the uncertainty from the higher level latent space. Therefore, the deep learning model under it lacks interpretability and ignores uncertainty from the raw data. In this paper, we merge features of the deep Bayesian learning framework with deep kernel learning to leverage the strengths of both methods for more comprehensive uncertainty estimation. Through a series of experiments on predicting the first incidence of heart failure, diabetes and depression applied to large-scale electronic medical records, we demonstrate that our method is better at capturing uncertainty than both Gaussian processes and deep Bayesian neural networks in terms of indicating data insufficiency and distinguishing true positive and false positive predictions, with a comparable generalisation performance. Furthermore, by assessing the accuracy and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve over the predictive probability, we show that our method is less susceptible to making overconfident predictions, especially for the minority class in imbalanced datasets. Finally, we demonstrate how uncertainty information derived by the model can inform risk factor analysis towards model interpretability.
Today, despite decades of developments in medicine and the growing interest in precision healthcare, vast majority of diagnoses happen once patients begin to show noticeable signs of illness. Early indication and detection of diseases, however, can provide patients and carers with the chance of early intervention, better disease management, and efficient allocation of healthcare resources. The latest developments in machine learning (more specifically, deep learning) provides a great opportunity to address this unmet need. In this study, we introduce BEHRT: A deep neural sequence transduction model for EHR (electronic health records), capable of multitask prediction and disease trajectory mapping. When trained and evaluated on the data from nearly 1.6 million individuals, BEHRT shows a striking absolute improvement of 8.0-10.8%, in terms of Average Precision Score, compared to the existing state-of-the-art deep EHR models (in terms of average precision, when predicting for the onset of 301 conditions). In addition to its superior prediction power, BEHRT provides a personalised view of disease trajectories through its attention mechanism; its flexible architecture enables it to incorporate multiple heterogeneous concepts (e.g., diagnosis, medication, measurements, and more) to improve the accuracy of its predictions; and its (pre-)training results in disease and patient representations that can help us get a step closer to interpretable predictions.
The use of collaborative and decentralized machine learning techniques such as federated learning have the potential to enable the development and deployment of clinical risk predictions models in low-resource settings without requiring sensitive data be shared or stored in a central repository. This process necessitates communication of model weights or updates between collaborating entities, but it is unclear to what extent patient privacy is compromised as a result. To gain insight into this question, we study the efficacy of centralized versus federated learning in both private and non-private settings. The clinical prediction tasks we consider are the prediction of prolonged length of stay and in-hospital mortality across thirty one hospitals in the eICU Collaborative Research Database. We find that while it is straightforward to apply differentially private stochastic gradient descent to achieve strong privacy bounds when training in a centralized setting, it is considerably more difficult to do so in the federated setting.
Identifying patients who will be discharged within 24 hours can improve hospital resource management and quality of care. We studied this problem using eight years of Electronic Health Records (EHR) data from Stanford Hospital. We fit models to predict 24 hour discharge across the entire inpatient population. The best performing models achieved an area under the receiver-operator characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.85 and an AUPRC of 0.53 on a held out test set. This model was also well calibrated. Finally, we analyzed the utility of this model in a decision theoretic framework to identify regions of ROC space in which using the model increases expected utility compared to the trivial always negative or always positive classifiers.
In recent years, we have witnessed an increased interest in temporal modeling of patient records from large scale Electronic Health Records (EHR). While simpler RNN models have been used for such problems, memory networks, which in other domains were found to generalize well, are underutilized. Traditional memory networks involve diffused and non-linear operations where influence of past events on outputs are not readily quantifiable. We posit that this lack of interpretability makes such networks not applicable for EHR analysis. While networks with explicit memory have been proposed recently, the discontinuities imposed by the discrete operations make such networks harder to train and require more supervision. The problem is further exacerbated in the limited data setting of EHR studies. In this paper, we propose a novel memory architecture that is more interpretable than traditional memory networks while being easier to train than explicit memory banks. Inspired by well-known models of human cognition, we propose partitioning the external memory space into (a) a primary explicit memory block to store exact replicas of recent events to support interpretations, followed by (b) a secondary blurred memory block that accumulates salient aspects of past events dropped from the explicit block as higher level abstractions and allow training with less supervision by stabilize the gradients. We apply the model for 3 learning problems on ICU records from the MIMIC III database spanning millions of data points. Our model performs comparably to the state-of the art while also, crucially, enabling ready interpretation of the results.
Increasing volume of Electronic Health Records (EHR) in recent years provides great opportunities for data scientists to collaborate on different aspects of healthcare research by applying advanced analytics to these EHR clinical data. A key requirement however is obtaining meaningful insights from high dimensional, sparse and complex clinical data. Data science approaches typically address this challenge by performing feature learning in order to build more reliable and informative feature representations from clinical data followed by supervised learning. In this paper, we propose a predictive modeling approach based on deep learning based feature representations and word embedding techniques. Our method uses different deep architectures (stacked sparse autoencoders, deep belief network, adversarial autoencoders and variational autoencoders) for feature representation in higher-level abstraction to obtain effective and robust features from EHRs, and then build prediction models on top of them. Our approach is particularly useful when the unlabeled data is abundant whereas labeled data is scarce. We investigate the performance of representation learning through a supervised learning approach. Our focus is to present a comparative study to evaluate the performance of different deep architectures through supervised learning and provide insights in the choice of deep feature representation techniques. Our experiments demonstrate that for small data sets, stacked sparse autoencoder demonstrates a superior generality performance in prediction due to sparsity regularization whereas variational autoencoders outperform the competing approaches for large data sets due to its capability of learning the representation distribution.