Clinical Note Owns its Hierarchy: Multi-Level Hypergraph Neural Networks for Patient-Level Representation Learning

Nayeon Kim, Yinhua Piao, Sun Kim


Abstract
Leveraging knowledge from electronic health records (EHRs) to predict a patient’s condition is essential to the effective delivery of appropriate care. Clinical notes of patient EHRs contain valuable information from healthcare professionals, but have been underused due to their difficult contents and complex hierarchies. Recently, hypergraph-based methods have been proposed for document classifications. Directly adopting existing hypergraph methods on clinical notes cannot sufficiently utilize the hierarchy information of the patient, which can degrade clinical semantic information by (1) frequent neutral words and (2) hierarchies with imbalanced distribution. Thus, we propose a taxonomy-aware multi-level hypergraph neural network (TM-HGNN), where multi-level hypergraphs assemble useful neutral words with rare keywords via note and taxonomy level hyperedges to retain the clinical semantic information. The constructed patient hypergraphs are fed into hierarchical message passing layers for learning more balanced multi-level knowledge at the note and taxonomy levels. We validate the effectiveness of TM-HGNN by conducting extensive experiments with MIMIC-III dataset on benchmark in-hospital-mortality prediction.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.305
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5559–5573
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.305
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.305
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nayeon Kim, Yinhua Piao, and Sun Kim. 2023. Clinical Note Owns its Hierarchy: Multi-Level Hypergraph Neural Networks for Patient-Level Representation Learning. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5559–5573, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Clinical Note Owns its Hierarchy: Multi-Level Hypergraph Neural Networks for Patient-Level Representation Learning (Kim et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.305.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.305.mp4