Domain Knowledge Guided Deep Learning with Electronic Health Records Due to their promising performance in clinical risk prediction with Electronic Health Records (EHRs), deep learning methods have attracted significant interest from healthcare researchers. However, there are 4 challenges: (i) Data insufficiency. Many methods require large amounts of training data to achieve satisfactory results. (ii) Interpretability. Results from many methods are hard to explain to clinicians (e.g., why the models make particular predictions and which events cause clinical outcomes). (iii) Domain knowledge integration. No existing method dynamically exploits complicated medical knowledge (e.g., relations such as cause and iscausedby between clinical events). (iv) Time interval information. Most existing methods only consider the relative order of visits from EHRs, but ignore the irregular time intervals between neighboring visits. In the study, we propose a new model, Domain Knowledge Guided Recurrent Neural Networks (DGRNN), by directly introducing domain knowledge from the medical knowledge graph into an RNN architecture, as well as taking the irregular time intervals into account. Experimental results on heart failure risk prediction tasks show that our model not only outperforms stateoftheart deeplearning based risk prediction models, but also associates individual medical events with heart failure onset, thus paving the way for interpretable accurate clinical risk predictions.

KnowRisk: An Interpretable KnowledgeGuided Model for Disease Risk Prediction Thanks to the widespread adoption of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, a variety of datadriven clinical risk prediction approaches have been spawned in recent years. However, there remain three challenges, which if addressed would improve the performance and applicability of such models. (i) Due to the limited data sharing between different health care institutions, the EHR data collected by a single institution is often inadequate or missing some visits records. The limited number of data cannot meet the large sample required of recent approaches especially deep learning models. In addition, the missing records (due to visiting different institution) may contain important health condition of the patient, which if ignored would cause prediction bias. (ii) Few existing approaches take clinical knowledge into account. The auxiliary knowledge if included can greatly reduce the data dependency of many modern learning algorithms. (iii) Most existing deep learning based methods are unable to identify the contribution of each medical event to the final results, which prohibits such models from being widely accepted in practical clinical applications. In this paper, we propose an interpretable and knowledgeguided deep model to address these challenges. Specifically, we distill knowledge from a clinical knowledge graph both explicitly and implicitly, which can not only supplement inadequate patient records but also guide the predicting process of the model. Furthermore, skipconnections and attention mechanisms are adopted to improve the interpretability of our model. In the context of heart failure prediction task, our model outperforms several stateoftheart methods. Finally, a series of case studies are presented to prove the interpretability of our model.