ACDNet: Attention-guided Collaborative Decision Network for Effective Medication Recommendation

TL;DR

ACDNet is a novel attention-guided model that leverages Transformer and collaborative decision frameworks to improve medication recommendations from complex EHR data, outperforming existing models.

Contribution

The paper introduces ACDNet, which effectively captures patient health conditions and medication records using attention mechanisms and models their similarity for better recommendations.

Findings

ACDNet outperforms state-of-the-art models on MIMIC datasets.

Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each module.

Case study demonstrates practical applicability in healthcare.

Abstract

Medication recommendation using Electronic Health Records (EHR) is challenging due to complex medical data. Current approaches extract longitudinal information from patient EHR to personalize recommendations. However, existing models often lack sufficient patient representation and overlook the importance of considering the similarity between a patient's medication records and specific medicines. Therefore, an Attention-guided Collaborative Decision Network (ACDNet) for medication recommendation is proposed in this paper. Specifically, ACDNet utilizes attention mechanism and Transformer to effectively capture patient health conditions and medication records by modeling their historical visits at both global and local levels. ACDNet also employs a collaborative decision framework, utilizing the similarity between medication records and medicine representation to facilitate the recommendation process. The experimental results on two extensive medical datasets, MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, clearly demonstrate that ACDNet outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of Jaccard, PR-AUC, and F1 score, reaffirming its superiority. Moreover, the ablation experiments provide solid evidence of the effectiveness of each module in ACDNet, validating their contribution to the overall performance. Furthermore, a detailed case study reinforces the effectiveness of ACDNet in medication recommendation based on EHR data, showcasing its practical value in real-world healthcare scenarios.