Predicting Heart Failure Readmission from Clinical Notes Using Deep Learning Heart failure hospitalization is a severe burden on healthcare. How to predict and therefore prevent readmission has been a significant challenge in outcomes research. To address this, we propose a deep learning approach to predict readmission from clinical notes. Unlike conventional methods that use structured data for prediction, we leverage the unstructured clinical notes to train deep learning models based on convolutional neural networks (CNN). We then use the trained models to classify and predict potentially highrisk admissionspatients. For evaluation, we trained CNNs using the discharge summary notes in the MIMIC III database. We also trained regular machine learning models based on random forest using the same datasets. The result shows that deep learning models outperform the regular models in prediction tasks. CNN method achieves a F1 score of 0.756 in general readmission prediction and 0.733 in 30day readmission prediction, while random forest only achieves a F1 score of 0.674 and 0.656 respectively. We also propose a chisquare test based method to interpret key features associated with deep learning predicted readmissions. It reveals clinical insights about readmission embedded in the clinical notes. Collectively, our method can make the human evaluation process more efficient and potentially facilitate the reduction of readmission rates.

Deep learning for electronic health records: A comparative review of multiple deep neural architectures Abstract   Despite the recent developments in deep learning models, their applications in clinical decisionsupport systems have been very limited. Recent digitalisation of health records, however, has provided a great platform for the assessment of the usability of such techniques in healthcare. As a result, the field is starting to see a growing number of research papers that employ deep learning on electronic health records (EHR) for personalised prediction of risks and health trajectories. While this can be a promising trend, vast papertopaper variability (from data sources and models they use to the clinical questions they attempt to answer) have hampered the fieldxe2x80x99s ability to simply compare and contrast such models for a given application of interest. Thus, in this paper, we aim to provide a comparative review of the key deep learning architectures that have been applied to EHR data. Furthermore, we also aim to: (1) introduce and use one of the worldxe2x80x99s largest and most complex linked primary care EHR datasets (i.e., Clinical Practice Research Datalink, or CPRD) as a new asset for training such datahungry models; (2) provide a guideline for working with EHR data for deep learning; (3) share some of the best practices for assessing the xe2x80x9cgoodnessxe2x80x9d of deeplearning models in clinical risk prediction; (4) and propose future research ideas for making deep learning models more suitable for the EHR data. Our results highlight the difficulties of working with highly imbalanced datasets, and show that sequential deep learning architectures such as RNN may be more suitable to deal with the temporal nature of EHR.