MedML: Fusing medical knowledge and machine learning models for early pediatric COVID-19 hospitalization and severity prediction

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused devastating economic and social disruption. This has led to a nationwide call for models to predict hospitalization and severe illness in patients with COVID-19 to inform the distribution of limited healthcare resources. To address this challenge, we propose a machine learning model, MedML, to conduct the hospitalization and severity prediction for the pediatric population using electronic health records. MedML extracts the most predictive features based on medical knowledge and propensity scores from over 6 million medical concepts and incorporates the inter-feature relationships in medical knowledge graphs via graph neural networks. We evaluate MedML on the National Cohort Collaborative (N3C) dataset. MedML achieves up to a 7% higher AUROC and 14% higher AUPRC compared to the best baseline machine learning models. MedML is a new machine learnig framework to incorporate clinical domain knowledge and is more predictive and explainable than current data-driven methods.