Prediction of Transfusion among In-patient Population using Temporal Pattern based Clinical Similarity Graphs

Intelligent prediction of risk of blood transfusion among hospitalized patients can identify at-risk patients and provide timely information to the hospital to plan and reserve resources to meet the demand of blood transfusion. While previously proposed solutions focus on sub-populations such as patients admitted to ICU after gastrointestinal bleeding or postpartum patients with hemorrhage, we design a predictive model applicable to complete in-patient population. Our model relies on patients' similarity graph based on temporal patterns among clinical history of the patients. These graphs are processed through graph convolutional neural network (GCNN) to estimate node or patient level risk of blood transfusion. Thus, our model not only learns from the patient's own clinical history but also from other patients with similar clinical history. The model is also capable of fusing diverse data elements from electronic health records (EHR) such as demographic information, billing codes, and recorded vital signs. Our model was validated on both internal and external sets and outperformed all comparative baseline models.