Visualizing electronic medical records of diabetic patients using pairwise similarity for explainable structuring

Abstract

As medical databases grow larger and larger, medical ex- perts oftenlack appropriate and accessible tools to make the best of the datasetsavailable and transform data into actionable information. Manyknowledge extraction algorithms provide relevant results but failto provide explainable and transparent results. Accountability isparamount in healthcare, and hospital staff cannot rely on black boxtools when it comes to taking informed decisions. To address thissituation we propose an algorithm able to structure thousands ofelectronic medical records by similarity and typicality. Using a rank-based approach suitable for high-dimensional data, we associateeach patient’s record to a very sim- ilar yet more typical record.This provides a structure suitable for data visualization, allowingfor both a high-level summary of a cohort and its representativepatients, and a detailed representation of similarities and relationsin each cluster. We applied this method to electronic medical recordsof diabetic patients, providing an easy tool for visualization and- exploration of these data with the added benefit of explainability.

Joris Falip

Associate professor

My research interests include artificial intelligence, exploratory data analysis and coding.