Deep EHR Spotlight: a Framework and Mechanism to Highlight Events in Electronic Health Records for Explainable Predictions

Thanh Nguyen-Duc, Natasha Mulligan, Gurdeep S. Mannu, Joao H. Bettencourt-Silva

Published 2021-03-25Version 1

The wide adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) has resulted in large amounts of clinical data becoming available, which promises to support service delivery and advance clinical and informatics research. Deep learning techniques have demonstrated performance in predictive analytic tasks using EHRs yet they typically lack model result transparency or explainability functionalities and require cumbersome pre-processing tasks. Moreover, EHRs contain heterogeneous and multi-modal data points such as text, numbers and time series which further hinder visualisation and interpretability. This paper proposes a deep learning framework to: 1) encode patient pathways from EHRs into images, 2) highlight important events within pathway images, and 3) enable more complex predictions with additional intelligibility. The proposed method relies on a deep attention mechanism for visualisation of the predictions and allows predicting multiple sequential outcomes.