Automated clinical diagnosis: The role of content in various sections of a clinical document

Clinical diagnosis is a critical aspect of patient care that is typically driven by expert medical knowledge and intuition. An automated system for clinical diagnosis could reduce the cognitive burden of clinicians during patient care and medical education. In this paper, we describe a Knowledge Graph (KG)-based clinical diagnosis system that leverages publicly available knowledge sources to infer possible diagnoses from free-text clinical narratives. We experiment with the content in various sections of a clinical document within the electronic health record (EHR) to investigate the contribution of each section to the performance of automated diagnosis systems. Evaluation on MIMIC-III dataset demonstrates that the content of “history of present illness” and “past medical history” sections can play a greater role for clinical diagnosis inference than other sections and all sections combined. Comparison with a state-of-the-art deep learning-based clinical diagnosis system confirms the effectiveness of our system.