Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 26, 2025

Patient-specific Modeling of the Heart: Estimation of Ventricular Fiber Orientations
Published on: January 8, 2013
Representation of time-varying and time-invariant EMR data and its application in modeling outcome prediction for
Yanqun Huang1, Muyu Wang1, Zhimin Zheng1
1School of Biomedical Engineering, Capital Medical University, No.10, Xitoutiao, You An Men, Fengtai District, Beijing 100069, China; Beijing Key Laboratory of Fundamental Research on Biomechanics in Clinical Application, Capital Medical University, No.10, Xitoutiao, You An Men, Fengtai District, Beijing 100069, China.
Objective:
To represent a patient record with both time-invariant and time-varying features as a single vector using an end-to-end deep learning model, and further to predict the kidney failure (KF) status and mortality of heart failure (HF) patients.
Materials And Methods:
The time-invariant EMR data included demographic information and comorbidities, and the time-varying EMR data were lab tests. We used a Transformer encoder module to represent the time-invariant data, and refined a long short-term memory (LSTM) with a Transformer encoder attached to the top to represent the time-varying data, taking the original measured values and their corresponding embedding vectors, masking vectors, and two types of time intervals as inputs. The proposed representations of patients with time-invariant and time-varying data were used to predict KF status (949 out of 5268 HF patients diagnosed with KF) and mortality (463 in-hospital deaths) for HF patients. Comparative experiments were conducted between the proposed model and some representative machine learning models. Ablation experiments were also performed around the time-varying data representation, including replacing the refined LSTM with the standard LSTM, GRU-D and T-LSTM, respectively, and removing the Transformer encoder and the time-varying data representation module, respectively. The visualization of the attention weights of the time-invariant and time-varying features was used to clinically interpret the predictive performance. We used the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC), and the F1-score to evaluate the predictive performance of the models.
Results:
The proposed model achieved superior performance, with average AUROCs, AUPRCs and F1-scores of 0.960, 0.610 and 0.759 for KF prediction and 0.937, 0.353 and 0.537 for mortality prediction, respectively. Predictive performance improved with the addition of time-varying data from longer time periods. The proposed model outperformed the comparison and ablation references in both prediction tasks.
Conclusions:
Both time-invariant and time-varying EMR data of patients could be efficiently represented by the proposed unified deep learning model, which shows higher performance in clinical prediction tasks. The way to use time-varying data in the current study is hopeful to be used in other kinds of time-varying data and other clinical tasks.

