Clinical Risk Prediction Models with Meta-Learning Prototypes of Patient Heterogeneity

Hospitalized patients sometimes have complex health conditions, such as multiple diseases, underlying diseases, and complications. The heterogeneous patient conditions may have various representations. A generalized model ignores the differences among heterogeneous patients, and personalized models, even with transfer learning, are still limited to the small amount of training data and the repeated training process. Meta-learning provides a solution for training similar patients based on few-shot learning; however, cannot address common cross-domain patients. Inspired by prototypical networks [1], we proposed a meta-prototype for Electronic Health Records (EHR), a meta-learning-based model with flexible prototypes representing the heterogeneity in patients. We apply this technique to cardiovascular diseases in MIMIC-III and compare it against a set of benchmark models, and demonstrate its ability to address heterogeneous patient health conditions and improve the model performances from 1.2% to 11.9% on different metrics and prediction tasks.Clinical relevance— Developing an adaptive EHR risk prediction model for outcomes-driven phenotyping of heterogeneous patient health conditions.