Explainable deep learning based medical diagnostic system

Abstract

Abstract Recently, many researchers have conducted data mining over medical data to uncover hidden patterns and use them to learn prediction models for clinical decision making and personalized medicine. While such healthcare learning models can achieve encouraging results, they seldom incorporate existing expert knowledge into their frameworks and hence prediction accuracy for individual patients can still be improved. However, expert knowledge spans across various websites and multiple databases with heterogeneous representations and hence is difficult to harness for improving learning models. In addition, patients' queries at medical consult websites are often ambiguous in their specified terms and hence the returned responses may not contain the information they seek. To tackle these problems, we first design a knowledge extraction framework that can generate an aggregated dataset to characterize diseases by integrating heterogeneous medical data sources. Then, based on the integrated dataset, we propose an end-to-end deep learning based medical diagnosis system ( D L - M D S ) to provide disease diagnosis for authorized users. We also provide explanations for the diagnose results. Evaluations on real-world data demonstrate that our proposed system achieves good performance on diseases diagnosis with a diverse set of patients’ queries.