Simultaneous Measurement Imputation and Outcome Prediction for Achilles Tendon Rupture Rehabilitation

Achilles Tendon Rupture (ATR) is one of the typical soft tissue injuries. Rehabilitation after such a musculoskeletal injury remains a prolonged process with a very variable outcome. Accurately predicting rehabilitation outcome is crucial for treatment decision support. However, it is challenging to train an automatic method for predicting the ATR rehabilitation outcome from treatment data, due to a massive amount of missing entries in the data recorded from ATR patients, as well as complex nonlinear relations between measurements and outcomes. In this work, we design an end-to-end probabilistic framework to impute missing data entries and predict rehabilitation outcomes simultaneously. We evaluate our model on a real-life ATR clinical cohort, comparing with various baselines. The proposed method demonstrates its clear superiority over traditional methods which typically perform imputation and prediction in two separate stages

Predicting Unplanned Hospital Readmissions using Patient Level Data

The rate of unplanned hospital readmissions in the US is likely to face a steady rise after 2020. Hence, this issue has received considerable critical attention with the policy makers. Majority of hospitals in the US pay millions of dollars as penalty for readmitting patients within 30 days due to strict norms imposed by the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program. In this study, we develop two novel models: PURE (Predicting Unplanned Readmissions using Embeddings) and Hybrid DeepR, which uses the historical medical events of patients to predict readmissions within 30 days. Both these models are hybrid sequence models that leverage both sequential events (history of events) and static features (like gender, blood pressure) of the patients to mine patterns in the data. Our results are promising, and they benchmark previous results in predicting hospital readmissions. The contributions of this study add to existing literature on healthcare analytics

Learning Patient Static Information from Time-series EHR and an Approach for Safeguarding Privacy and Fairness

Recent work in machine learning for healthcare has raised concerns about patient privacy and algorithmic fairness. For example, previous work has shown that patient self-reported race can be predicted from medical data that does not explicitly contain racial information. However, the extent of data identification is unknown, and we lack ways to develop models whose outcomes are minimally affected by such information. Here we systematically investigated the ability of time-series electronic health record data to predict patient static information. We found that not only the raw time-series data, but also learned representations from machine learning models, can be trained to predict a variety of static information with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve as high as 0.851 for biological sex, 0.869 for binarized age and 0.810 for self-reported race. Such high predictive performance can be extended to a wide range of comorbidity factors and exists even when the model was trained for different tasks, using different cohorts, using different model architectures and databases. Given the privacy and fairness concerns these findings pose, we develop a variational autoencoder-based approach that learns a structured latent space to disentangle patient-sensitive attributes from time-series data. Our work thoroughly investigates the ability of machine learning models to encode patient static information from time-series electronic health records and introduces a general approach to protect patient-sensitive attribute information for downstream tasks