Unifying Diagnosis Identification and Prediction Method Embedding the Disease Ontology Structure From Electronic Medical Records

OBJECTIVE: The reasonable classification of a large number of distinct diagnosis codes can clarify patient diagnostic information and help clinicians to improve their ability to assign and target treatment for primary diseases. Our objective is to identify and predict a unifying diagnosis (UD) from electronic medical records (EMRs). METHODS: We screened 4,418 sepsis patients from a public MIMIC-III database and extracted their diagnostic information for UD identification, their demographic information, laboratory examination information, chief complaint, and history of present illness information for UD prediction. We proposed a data-driven UD identification and prediction method (UDIPM) embedding the disease ontology structure. First, we designed a set similarity measure method embedding the disease ontology structure to generate a patient similarity matrix. Second, we applied affinity propagation clustering to divide patients into different clusters, and extracted a typical diagnosis code co-occurrence pattern from each cluster. Furthermore, we identified a UD by fusing visual analysis and a conditional co-occurrence matrix. Finally, we trained five classifiers in combination with feature fusion and feature selection method to unify the diagnosis prediction. RESULTS: The experimental results on a public electronic medical record dataset showed that the UDIPM could extracted a typical diagnosis code co-occurrence pattern effectively, identified and predicted a UD based on patients' diagnostic and admission information, and outperformed other fusion methods overall. CONCLUSIONS: The accurate identification and prediction of the UD from a large number of distinct diagnosis codes and multi-source heterogeneous patient admission information in EMRs can provide a data-driven approach to assist better coding integration of diagnosis.