Multi-Channel Hypergraph Network for Sequential Diagnosis Prediction in Healthcare

Xin Zhang, Xueping Peng, Weimin Chen, Weiyu Zhang, Xiaoqiang Ren, Wenpeng Lu

Abstract: Sequential diagnosis prediction (SDP) is a complex and challenging task, aming to predict future diagnoses of patients by analyzing their historical medical records. Although graph neural networks(GNNs) has been applied to successfully address the challenge of heterogeneous data integration in electronic health records, relatively limited work has been done on GNNs for sequential diagnosis prediction. Graph neural network-based methods, aimed at capturing structural and relational patterns of EHR data for sequential diagnosis prediction, explore code-code pairwise relationships, resulting in an inability to learn fine-grained, higher-order interaction relationships among different types medical codes. As a result, they are difficult to effectively model complex, multi-dimensional interactions among different types of medical codes necessary for accurate and nuanced diagnosis predictions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel approach called Multi-Channel Hypergraph Network (MCHN) predictive framework for sequential diagnosis prediction. The proposed method aims to explore the fine-grained higher-order interactions between different types of medical codes via multi-channel hypergraphs. Specifically, MCHN learns two levels of code embeddings from multi-channel hypergraph learning module and line graph learning module, respectively: (i) multi-channel hypergraph learning module, which is to learn multi-channel hypergraph level code embeddings by modeling the higher-order relationships between medical codes in different hypergraphs; and (ii) line graph learning module, which is to learn the line graph level code embeddings by modeling code-code pairwise relationships. In MCHN, we propose a novel channel-level attention mechanism to help our model attend to the informativeness of the different channel for forecasting future patient diagnoses. We also design a code-level attention mechanism, which can to pay more attention to the medical codes that are more important to the visit representation. Moreover, MCHN aggregates the learnt code embeddings in the two levels to generate the visit representation, which is used to predict the patient’s next diagnosis. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets consistently demonstrate that MCHN outperforms state-of-the-art methods 1 .