Heterogeneous Information Network-Based Patient Similarity Search

Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology

Wei Guo¹  Xu-dong Lu²  Zhong-min Yan²  Shi-peng Wang²  Hao-zhe Huang²  Xin-bo Jiang³ 

[1] Joint SDU-NTU Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, Shandong University, Jinan, China;School of Software, Shandong University, Jinan, China;Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Software Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, China;

关键词: heterogeneous information network;    clinical similarity;    electronic health records;    patient similarity search;    weighted meta path;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fcell.2021.735687

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Patient similarity search is a fundamental and important task in artificial intelligence-assisted medicine service, which is beneficial to medical diagnosis, such as making accurate predictions for similar diseases and recommending personalized treatment plans. Existing patient similarity search methods retrieve medical events associated with patients from Electronic Health Record (EHR) data and map them to vectors. The similarity between patients is expressed by calculating the similarity or dissimilarity between the corresponding vectors of medical events, thereby completing the patient similarity measurement. However, the obtained vectors tend to be high dimensional and sparse, which makes it hard to calculate patient similarity accurately. In addition, most of existing methods cannot capture the time information in the EHR, which is not conducive to analyzing the influence of time factors on patient similarity search. To solve these problems, we propose a patient similarity search method based on a heterogeneous information network. On the one hand, the proposed method uses a heterogeneous information network to connect patients, diseases, and drugs, which solves the problem of vector representation of mixed information related to patients, diseases, and drugs. Meanwhile, our method measures the similarity between patients by calculating the similarity between nodes in the heterogeneous information network. In this way, the challenges caused by high-dimensional and sparse vectors can be addressed. On the other hand, the proposed method solves the problem of inaccurate patient similarity search caused by the lack of use of time information in the patient similarity measurement process by encoding time information into an annotated heterogeneous information network. Experiments show that our method is better than the compared baseline methods.

【 授权许可】

Unknown