Semantic-Aware Graph Convolutional Networks for Clinical Auxiliary Diagnosis and Treatment of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Abstract

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) clinical informatization focuses on serving user-oriented health knowledge and facilitating online diagnosis. Regularities are hidden in clinical knowledge play a significant role in the improvement of the TCM informatization service. However, many regularities can hardly be discovered because of specific data-challenges in TCM prescriptions at present. Therefore, in this article, we propose an end-to-end model, called Semantic-aware Graph Convolutional Networks (SaGCN) model, to learn the latent regularities in three steps: (1) We first construct a heterogeneous graph based on prescriptions; (2) We stack Semantic-aware graph convolution to learn effective low-dimensional representations of nodes by meta-graphs and self-attention; (3) With the learned representations, we can detect regularities accurately by clustering and linked prediction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to use metagraph and graph convolutional networks for modeling TCM clinical data and diagnosis prediction. Experimental results on three real datasets demonstrate SaGCN outperforms the state-of-the-art models for clinical auxiliary diagnosis and treatment.