Processing clinical notes using recurrent neural networks

Abstract

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for predicting future patient health using neural networks. One of the methods includes receiving electronic health record data for a patient; generating a respective observation embedding for each of the observations, comprising, for each clinical note: processing the sequence of tokens in the clinical note using a clinical note embedding LSTM to generate a respective token embedding for each of the tokens; and generating the observation embedding for the clinical note from the token embeddings; generating an embedded representation, comprising, for each time window: combining the observation embeddings of observations occurring during the time window to generate a patient record embedding; and processing the embedded representation of the electronic health record data using a prediction recurrent neural network to generate a neural network output that characterizes a future health status of the patient.