Clinical Data-Driven Probabilistic Graph Processing

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) encode an extraordinary amount of medical knowledge. Collecting and interpreting this knowledge, however, belies a significant level of clinical understanding. Automatically capturing the clinical information is crucial for performing comparative effectiveness research. In this paper, we present a data-driven approach to model semantic dependencies between medical concepts, qualified by the beliefs of physicians. The dependencies, captured in a patient cohort graph of clinical pictures and therapies is further refined into a probabilistic graphical model which enables efficient inference of patient-centered treatment or test recommendations (based on probabilities). To perform inference on the graphical model, we describe a technique of smoothing the conditional likelihood of medical concepts by their semantically-similar belief values. The experimental results, as compared against clinical guidelines are very promising.

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