Cited by 30Machine Learning in HealthcareArtificial Intelligence in HealthcareElectronic Health Records Systems

TA-RNN: an attention-based time-aware recurrent neural network architecture for electronic health records

Open access
Al Olaimat, Mohammad, Bozdag, Serdar, for the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative·2024·Bioinformatics

Abstract

Motivation: Electronic health records (EHRs) represent a comprehensive resource of a patient’s medical history. EHRs are essential for utilizing advanced technologies such as deep learning (DL), enabling healthcare providers to analyze extensive data, extract valuable insights, and make precise and data-driven clinical decisions. DL methods such as recurrent neural networks (RNN) have been utilized to analyze EHR to model disease progression and predict diagnosis. However, these methods do not address some inherent irregularities in EHR data such as irregular time intervals between clinical visits. Furthermore, most DL models are not interpretable. In this study, we propose two interpretable DL architectures based on RNN, namely time-aware RNN (TA-RNN) and TA-RNN-autoencoder (TA-RNN-AE) to predict patient’s clinical outcome in EHR at the next visit and multiple visits ahead, respectively. To mitigate the impact of irregular time intervals, we propose incorporating time embedding of the elapsed times between visits. For interpretability, we propose employing a dual-level attention mechanism that operates between visits and features within each visit. Results: The results of the experiments conducted on Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center (NACC) datasets indicated the superior performance of proposed models for predicting Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) compared to state-of-the-art and baseline approaches based on F2 and sensitivity. Additionally, TA-RNN showed superior performance on the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-III) dataset for mortality prediction. In our ablation study, we observed enhanced predictive performance by incorporating time embedding and attention mechanisms. Finally, investigating attention weights helped identify influential visits and features in predictions. Availability and implementation: https://github.com/bozdaglab/TA-RNN.

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  • Recurrent neural networks, including time-aware versions and attention-based methods, allow models to handle irregularly sampled EHR sequences and decide which time points are most clinically meaningful.

    “Usually, recurrent neural networks (RNNs), including time-aware versions and attention-based methods, allow models to handle irregularly sampled EHR sequences and decide which time points are most clinically meaningful46.”

    From K-STAMM: a knowledge-enhanced spatial - temporal attention model with multimodal fusion for pneumonia prediction (2026) · cites this paper as [46]

    The Introduction says time-aware RNN extensions can address irregular intervals and attention can identify significant time points. But it also says ordinary RNNs assume equal gaps between visits, so the claim is too broad in suggesting RNNs generally handle irregular sampling. (LLM, conf=0.87)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. Choi E, Bahadori MT, Sun J et al RETAIN: an interpretable predictive model for healthcare using reverse time attention mechanism. In: Lee D, Sugiyama M, Luxburg U, Guyon I, Garnett R (eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Barcelona, Spain, Vol. 29. Curran Associates, Inc., 2016, pp. 3504–12. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2016/file/231141b34c82aa95e48810a9d1b33a79-Paper.pdf.
  2. Johnson A, Pollard T, Mark R. MIMIC-III clinical database (version 1.4). PhysioNet 2016a; 10: 2.
  3. Vaswani A, Shazeer N, Parmar N et al Attention is all you need. In: Guyon I, Von Luxburg U, Bengio S, Wallach H, Fergus R, Vishwanathan S, Garnett R (eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Long Beach, USA, Vol. 30. La Jolla, USA: Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2017. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Paper.pdf.

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Authors
Al Olaimat, M., Bozdag, S., & Initiative, F. T. A. D. N.
Affiliations
  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas , Denton, TX 76203, United States
  • University of North Texas (US)
Corresponding author
Bozdag, Serdar
Venue
Bioinformatics
Published
2024-06-28
Volume
40
Issue
Supplement_1
Pages
i169-i179
ISSN
  • 1367-4803 (ISSN-L)
  • 1367-4811
OpenAlex
W4391335182
Cited by
30
References
32
Citations by year
2026: 14 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 2
FWCI
4.40
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Bioinformatics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) (submittedVersion, public-domain)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • National Institutes of Health (U01 AG024904, R35GM133657)
  • Department of Defense (W81XWH-12–2-0012)
  • National Institute on Aging
  • National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering
  • NIA (U24 AG072122, P30 AG062429)
  • National Institute of General Medical Sciences
  • University of North Texas
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning in Healthcare
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Electronic Health Records Systems
Keywords
electronic health records, attention mechanism, time embedding, irregular time intervals, explainable deep learning, Alzheimer's disease prediction, mortality prediction, autoencoder
MeSH terms
Deep Learning, Alzheimer Disease, Humans, Neural Networks, Computer, Electronic Health Records

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