A fusion framework to extract typical treatment patterns from electronic medical records

Objective: Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) contain temporal and heterogeneous doctor order information that can be used for treatment pattern discovery. Our objective is to identify “right patient”, “right drug”, “right dose”, “right route”, and “right time” from doctor order information. Methods: We propose a fusion framework to extract typical treatment patterns based on multi-view similarity Network Fusion (SNF) method. The multi-view SNF method involves three similarity measures: content-view similarity, sequence-view similarity and duration-view similarity. An EMR dataset and two metrics were utilized to evaluate the performance and to extract typical treatment patterns. Results: Experimental results on a real-world EMR dataset show that the multi-view similarity network fusion method outperforms all the single-view similarity measures and also outperforms the existing similarity measure methods. Furthermore, we extract and visualize typical treatment patterns by clustering analysis. Conclusion: The extracted typical treatment patterns by combining doctor order content, sequence, and duration views can provide data-driven guidelines for artificial intelligence in medicine and help clinicians make better decisions in clinical practice.