Knowledge guided multi-filter residual convolutional neural network for ICD coding from clinical text

Abstract

A common challenge encountered when using Deep Neural Network models for automatic ICD coding is their potential inability to effectively handle unseen clinical texts, especially when these models are only trained on a limited number of examples. This is because these models rely solely on the patterns and relationships present in the training data, and may not be able to effectively incorporate additional knowledge about the relationships between medical entities. To address this issue, we introduce KG-MultiResCNN—KnowledgeGuidedMulti-filterResidualConvolutionalNeuralNetwork model, which combines training examples with external knowledge from the Wikidata Knowledge Graph (KG) in order to better capture the relationships between medical entities. The KG is a structured database that contains a wealth of information about various entities, including medical concepts and their relationships with one another. By incorporating this external knowledge into our model, we are able to improve its ability to predict ICD codes for new clinical texts. In our experiments with the MIMIC-III dataset, we found that the KG-MultiResCNN model significantly outperformed the baseline approaches. This demonstrates the effectiveness of using external knowledge, in addition to training examples, to improve the performance of deep learning models for automatic ICD coding.