CafeMed: Causal Attention Fusion Enhanced Medication Recommendation

TL;DR

CafeMed introduces a novel framework that dynamically models causal relationships and interdependencies among medical entities to improve personalized medication recommendations, outperforming existing methods in accuracy and safety.

Contribution

It presents a new approach combining dynamic causal reasoning with cross-modal attention to enhance medication recommendation systems.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in accuracy.

Reduces drug--drug interaction rates.

Effectively models patient-specific treatment influences.

Abstract

Medication recommendation systems play a crucial role in assisting clinicians with personalized treatment decisions. While existing approaches have made significant progress in learning medication representations, they suffer from two fundamental limitations: (i) treating medical entities as independent features without modeling their synergistic effects on medication selection; (ii) employing static causal relationships that fail to adapt to patient-specific contexts and health states. To address these challenges, we propose CafeMed, a framework that integrates dynamic causal reasoning with cross-modal attention for safe and accurate medication recommendation. CafeMed introduces two key components: the Causal Weight Generator (CWG) that transforms static causal effects into dynamic modulation weights based on individual patient states, and the Channel Harmonized Attention Refinement Module (CHARM) that captures complex interdependencies between diagnoses and procedures. This design enables CafeMed to model how different medical conditions jointly influence treatment decisions while maintaining medication safety constraints. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV datasets demonstrate that CafeMed significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving superior accuracy in medication prediction while maintaining the lower drug--drug interaction rates. Our results indicate that incorporating dynamic causal relationships and cross-modal synergies leads to more clinically-aligned and personalized medication recommendations. Our code is released publicly at https://github.com/rkl71/CafeMed.