Enhanced character-level deep convolutional neural networks for cardiovascular disease prediction

BACKGROUND: Electronic medical records contain a variety of valuable medical information for patients. So, when we are able to recognize and extract risk factors for disease from EMRs of patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD), and are able to use them to predict CVD, we have the ability to automatically process clinical texts, resulting in an improved accuracy of supporting doctors for the clinical diagnosis of CVD. In the case where CVD is becoming more worldwide, predictive CVD based on EMRs has been studied by many researchers to address this important aspect of improving diagnostic efficiency. METHODS: This paper proposes an Enhanced Character-level Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (EnDCNN) model for cardiovascular disease prediction. RESULTS: On the manually annotated Chinese EMRs corpus, our risk factor identification extraction model achieved 0.9073 of F-score, our prediction model achieved 0.9516 of F-score, and the prediction result is better than the most previous methods. CONCLUSIONS: The character-level model based on text region embedding can well map risk factors and their labels as a unit into a vector, and downsampling plays a crucial role in improving the training efficiency of deep CNN. What's more, the shortcut connections with pre-activation used in our model architecture implements dimension-matching free in training.