Embedding Electronic Health Records for Clinical Information Retrieval

Neural network representation learning frameworks have recently shown to be highly effective at a wide range of tasks ranging from radiography interpretation via data-driven diagnostics to clinical decision support. This often superior performance comes at the price of dramatically increased training data requirements that cannot be satisfied in every given institution or scenario. As a means of countering such data sparsity effects, distant supervision alleviates the need for scarce in-domain data by relying on a related, resource-rich, task for training. This study presents an end-to-end neural clinical decision support system that recommends relevant literature for individual patients (few available resources) via distant supervision on the well-known MIMIC-III collection (abundant resource). Our experiments show significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness over traditional statistical as well as purely locally supervised retrieval models.