Injecting Domain Knowledge in Electronic Medical Records to Improve Hospitalization Prediction

Electronic medical records (EMR) contain key information about the different symptomatic episodes that a patient went through. They carry a great potential in order to improve the well-being of patients and therefore represent a very valuable input for artificial intelligence approaches. However, the explicit knowledge directly available through these records remains limited, the extracted features to be used by machine learning algorithms do not contain all the implicit knowledge of medical expert. In order to evaluate the impact of domain knowledge when processing EMRs, we augment the features extracted from EMRs with ontological resources before turning them into vectors used by machine learning algorithms. We evaluate these augmentations with several machine learning algorithms to predict hospitalization. Our approach was experimented on data from the PRIMEGE PACA database that contains more than 350,000 consultations carried out by 16 general practitioners (GPs).