Graph Neural Network Based Multi-Label Hierarchical Classification for Disease Predictions in General Practice.

Abstract

General practitioners are supposed to be better diagnostics to detect patients with serious diseases earlier, and conduct early interventions and appropriate referrals of patients. However, in the current general practice, primary general practitioners lack sufficient clinical experiences, and the correct rate of general disease diagnosis is low. To assist general practitioners in diagnosis, this paper proposes a multi-label hierarchical classification method based on graph neural network, which integrates medical knowledge and electronic health record (EHR) data to build a disease prediction model. The experimental results based on data consist of 231,783 visits from EHR show that the proposed model outperforms all baseline models in the general disease prediction task with a top-3 recall of 0.865. The interpretable results of the model can effectively help clinicians understand the basis of the model's decision-making.