MNN: Multimodal attentional neural networks for diagnosis prediction

Abstract

Diagnosis prediction plays a key role in clinical decision supporting process, which attracted extensive research attention recently. Existing studies mainly utilize discrete medical codes (e.g., the ICD codes and procedure codes) as the primary features in prediction. However, in real clinical settings, such medical codes could be either incomplete or erroneous. For example, missed diagnosis will neglect some codes which should be included, mis-diagnosis will generate incorrect medical codes. To increase the robustness towards noisy data, we introduce textual clinical notes in addition to medical codes. Combining information from both sides will lead to improved understanding towards clinical health conditions. To accommodate both the textual notes and discrete medical codes in the same framework, we propose Multimodal Attentional Neural Networks (MNN), which integrates multi-modal data in a collaborative manner. Experimental results on real world EHR datasets demonstrate the advantages of MNN in term of accuracy.