Leveraging Multi-Word Concepts to Predict Acute Kidney Injury in Intensive Care.

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is an abrupt decrease in kidney function widespread in intensive care. Many AKI prediction models have been proposed, but only few exploit clinical notes and medical terminologies. Previously, we developed and internally validated a model to predict AKI using clinical notes enriched with single-word concepts from medical knowledge graphs. However, an analysis of the impact of using multi-word concepts is lacking. In this study, we compare the use of only the clinical notes as input to prediction to the use of clinical notes retrofitted with both single-word and multi-word concepts. Our results show that 1) retrofitting single-word concepts improved word representations and improved the performance of the prediction model; 2) retrofitting multi-word concepts further improves both results, albeit slightly. Although the improvement with multi-word concepts was small, due to the small number of multi-word concepts that could be annotated, multi-word concepts have proven to be beneficial.