DeepCare: A Deep Dynamic Memory Model for Predictive Medicine

Personalized predictive medicine necessitates modeling of patient illness and care processes, which inherently have long-term temporal dependencies. Healthcare observations, recorded in electronic medical records, are episodic and irregular in time. We introduce DeepCare, a deep dynamic neural network that reads medical records and predicts future medical outcomes. At the data level, DeepCare models patient health state trajectories with explicit memory of illness. Built on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), DeepCare introduces time parameterizations to handle irregular timing by moderating the forgetting and consolidation of illness memory. DeepCare also incorporates medical interventions that change the course of illness and shape future medical risk. Moving up to the health state level, historical and present health states are then aggregated through multiscale temporal pooling, before passing through a neural network that estimates future outcomes. We demonstrate the efficacy of DeepCare for disease progression modeling and readmission prediction in diabetes, a chronic disease with large economic burden. The results show improved modeling and risk prediction accuracy.