Automatic recommendation of medical departments to outpatients based on text analyses and medical knowledge graph

Abstract

In many countries, outpatients generally visit a major hospital without a referral from health professionals due to the shortage of family physicians. Not knowing at which medical specialty department to register, outpatients have to wait in long queues to consult receptionists. We propose to alleviate this situation via a computer system offering an automatic recommendation of departments (ARD) to outpatients, which identifies the appropriate medical department for outpatients according to their chief complaints. Besides, ARD systems can boost the emerging services of online hospital registration and online medical diagnosis, which require that the outpatients know the correct department first. ARD is a typical problem of text classification. Nevertheless, off-the-shelf tools for text processing may not suit ARD, because the chief complaints of outpatients are generally brief and contain much noisy information. To solve this problem, we propose ARD-K, a deep learning framework incorporating external medical knowledge sources. We also propose a dual-attention mechanism to mitigate the interference of noisy words and knowledge entities. The performance of ARD-K is compared with some off-the-shelf techniques on a real-world dataset. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of ARD-K for the automatic recommendation of departments to outpatients.