The widespread availability of electronic health records (EHRs) promises to usher in the era of personalized medicine. However, the problem of extracting useful clinical representations from longitudinal EHR data remains challenging. In this paper, we explore deep neural network models with learned medical feature embedding to deal with the problems of high dimensionality and temporality. Specifically, we use a multi-layer convolutional neural network (CNN) to parameterize the model and is thus able to capture complex non-linear longitudinal evolution of EHRs. Our model can effectively capture local/short temporal dependency in EHRs, which is beneficial for risk prediction. To account for high dimensionality, we use the embedding medical features in the CNN model which hold the natural medical concepts. Our initial experiments produce promising results and demonstrate the effectiveness of both the medical feature embedding and the proposed convolutional neural network in risk prediction on cohorts of congestive heart failure and diabetes patients compared with several strong baselines.

本文探索使用深度神经网络模型以及学习的医疗特征嵌入（medical feature embedding）来处理从纵向电子病历数据中提取实用的临床表现（clinical representations）所面临的高维和时间性问题。作者在利用多层卷积神经网络（CNN）进行参数化时成功捕捉到了 EHR 纵向演变的复杂非线性关系，并在处理 EHR 的本地/短期时间依赖性上取得了良好的效果，对于失能心力和糖尿病患者的风险预测表现也优于基线模型。

利用卷积神经网络和医疗特征嵌入进行风险预测