A Conjoint Graph Representation Learning Framework for Hypertension Comorbidity Risk Prediction

The comorbidities of hypertension impose a heavy burden on patients and society. Early identification is necessary to prompt intervention, but it remains a challenging task. This study aims to address this challenge by combining joint graph learning with network analysis. Motivated by this discovery, we develop a Conjoint Graph Representation Learning (CGRL) framework that: a) constructs two networks based on disease coding, including the patient network and the disease difference network. Three comorbidity network features were generated based on the basic difference network to capture the potential relationship between comorbidities and risk diseases; b) incorporates computational structure intervention and learning feature representation, CGRL was developed to predict the risks of diabetes and coronary heart disease in patients; and c) analysis the comorbidity patterns and exploring the pathways of disease progression, the pathological pathogenesis of diabetes and coronary heart disease may be revealed. The results show that the network features extracted based on the difference network are important, and the framework we proposed provides more accurate predictions than other strong models in terms of accuracy.

Automated Fidelity Assessment for Strategy Training in Inpatient Rehabilitation using Natural Language Processing

Strategy training is a multidisciplinary rehabilitation approach that teaches skills to reduce disability among those with cognitive impairments following a stroke. Strategy training has been shown in randomized, controlled clinical trials to be a more feasible and efficacious intervention for promoting independence than traditional rehabilitation approaches. A standardized fidelity assessment is used to measure adherence to treatment principles by examining guided and directed verbal cues in video recordings of rehabilitation sessions. Although the fidelity assessment for detecting guided and directed verbal cues is valid and feasible for single-site studies, it can become labor intensive, time consuming, and expensive in large, multi-site pragmatic trials. To address this challenge to widespread strategy training implementation, we leveraged natural language processing (NLP) techniques to automate the strategy training fidelity assessment, i.e., to automatically identify guided and directed verbal cues from video recordings of rehabilitation sessions. We developed a rule-based NLP algorithm, a long-short term memory (LSTM) model, and a bidirectional encoder representation from transformers (BERT) model for this task. The best performance was achieved by the BERT model with a 0.8075 F1-score. The findings from this study hold widespread promise in psychology and rehabilitation intervention research and practice.

Toward Improving Health Literacy in Patient Education Materials with Neural Machine Translation Models

Health literacy is the central focus of Healthy People 2030, the fifth iteration of the U.S. national goals and objectives. People with low health literacy usually have trouble understanding health information, following post-visit instructions, and using prescriptions, which results in worse health outcomes and serious health disparities. In this study, we propose to leverage natural language processing techniques to improve health literacy in patient education materials by automatically translating illiterate languages in a given sentence. We scraped patient education materials from four online health information websites: MedlinePlus.gov, Drugs.com, Mayoclinic.org and Reddit.com. We trained and tested the state-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT) models on a silver standard training dataset and a gold standard testing dataset, respectively. The experimental results showed that the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) NMT model outperformed Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based NMT models. We also verified the effectiveness of NMT models in translating health illiterate languages by comparing the ratio of health illiterate language in the sentence. The proposed NMT models were able to identify the correct complicated words and simplify into layman language while at the same time the models suffer from sentence completeness, fluency, readability, and have difficulty in translating certain medical terms.