Combining structured and unstructured data for predictive models: a deep learning approach

Background The broad adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) provides great opportunities to conduct health care research and solve various clinical problems in medicine. With recent advances and success, methods based on machine learning and deep learning have become increasingly popular in medical informatics. However, while many research studies utilize temporal structured data on predictive modeling, they typically neglect potentially valuable information in unstructured clinical notes. Integrating heterogeneous data types across EHRs through deep learning techniques may help improve the performance of prediction models. Methods In this research, we proposed 2 general-purpose multi-modal neural network architectures to enhance patient representation learning by combining sequential unstructured notes with structured data. The proposed fusion models leverage document embeddings for the representation of long clinical note documents and either convolutional neural network or long short-term memory networks to model the sequential clinical notes and temporal signals, and one-hot encoding for static information representation. The concatenated representation is the final patient representation which is used to make predictions. Results We evaluate the performance of proposed models on 3 risk prediction tasks (i.e. in-hospital mortality, 30-day hospital readmission, and long length of stay prediction) using derived data from the publicly available Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III dataset. Our results show that by combining unstructured clinical notes with structured data, the proposed models outperform other models that utilize either unstructured notes or structured data only. Conclusions The proposed fusion models learn better patient representation by combining structured and unstructured data. Integrating heterogeneous data types across EHRs helps improve the performance of prediction models and reduce errors.