Enhancing Semantic and Structure Modeling of Diseases for Diagnosis Prediction.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are valuable healthcare data, aiding researchers and doctors in improving diagnosis accuracy. Researchers have developed several predictive models by learning disease representations to forecast the potential diagnosis that patients may receive. However, existing studies usually ignore the fine-grained semantic and structure information in EHRs (e.g., the hierarchical relations between diseases and ICD-9 codes), which fails to provide accurate disease representation towards effective diagnosis prediction. To this end, we propose to enhance diagnosis prediction through LabCare, a framework with improved semantic and structure modeling of diseases in EHR data. LabCare can simultaneously capture rich semantic and structural relations among diseases and ICD-9 codes, which is achieved by innovatively integrating language models and box embeddings. Extensive experiments on two EHR datasets show that LabCare surpasses competitors, consistently achieving a 4.29% average improvement in Recall and NDCG metrics.