A hybrid neural network model for predicting kidney disease in hypertension patients based on electronic health records

BACKGROUND: Disease prediction based on Electronic Health Records (EHR) has become one hot research topic in biomedical community. Existing work mainly focuses on the prediction of one target disease, and little work is proposed for multiple associated diseases prediction. Meanwhile, a piece of EHR usually contains two main information: the textual description and physical indicators. However, existing work largely adopts statistical models with discrete features from numerical physical indicators in EHR, and fails to make full use of textual description information. METHODS: In this paper, we study the problem of kidney disease prediction in hypertension patients by using neural network model. Specifically, we first model the prediction problem as a binary classification task. Then we propose a hybrid neural network which incorporates Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) and Autoencoder networks to fully capture the information in EHR. RESULTS: We construct a dataset based on a large number of raw EHR data. The dataset consists of totally 35,332 records from hypertension patients. Experimental results show that the proposed neural model achieves 89.7% accuracy for the task. CONCLUSIONS: A hybrid neural network model was presented. Based on the constructed dataset, the comparison results of different models demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed neural model. The proposed model outperformed traditional statistical models with discrete features and neural baseline systems.