Evidence map›Paper›PMID 29218877›Full record

ArticlePacific Symposium on Biocomputing. Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing2018

Automated disease cohort selection using word embeddings from Electronic Health Records.

Benjamin S Glicksberg, Riccardo Miotto, Kipp W Johnson, Khader Shameer, Li Li, Rong Chen, Joel T Dudley

Abstract readEvaluation Study
In one paragraph

Article in Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
26citing papers in PubMed, 1 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.

  1. Pooled it
  2. Article
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  4. A scalable framework for benchmark embedding models in semantic health-care tasks.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2025
    Article
  5. Article
  6. A Deployed Online Reinforcement Learning Algorithm In An Oral Health Clinical Trial.Proceedings of the ... AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 2025
    Article
  7. Article
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  12. Review
  13. Article
  14. A high-throughput phenotyping algorithm is portable from adult to pediatric populations.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2021
    Article
  15. Article
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

7 authors.

Benjamin S GlicksbergDepartment of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, 1 Gustave L. Levy Pl. New York, NY 10065, USA, ²Institute for Next Generation Healthcare, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, 1 Gustave L. Levy Pl. New York, NY 10065, USA.
Riccardo Miotto
Kipp W Johnson
Khader Shameer
Li Li
Rong Chen
Joel T Dudley

Funding

MSHS Translational Science HubUL1TR001433 · NCATS · ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI · PI WRIGHT, ROSALIND J · 2015 to 2019
$26.6M
Methods for Evolutionary Informed Network Analysis to Discover Disease VariationR01DK098242 · NIDDK · ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI · PI DUDLEY, JOEL THOMAS · 2013 to 2016
$1.7M
NCATS NIH HHS UL1 TR001433NIDDK NIH HHS R01 DK098242
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Accurate and robust cohort definition is critical to biomedical discovery using Electronic Health Records (EHR). Similar to prospective study designs, high quality EHR-based research requires rigorous selection criteria to designate case/control status particular to each disease. Electronic phenotyping algorithms, which are manually built and validated per disease, have been successful in filling this need. However, these approaches are time-consuming, leading to only a relatively small amount of algorithms for diseases developed. Methodologies that automatically learn features from EHRs have been used for cohort selection as well. To date, however, there has been no systematic analysis of how these methods perform against current gold standards. Accordingly, this paper compares the performance of a state-of-the-art automated feature learning method to extracting research-grade cohorts for five diseases against their established electronic phenotyping algorithms. In particular, we use word2vec to create unsupervised embeddings of the phenotype space within an EHR system. Using medical concepts as a query, we then rank patients by their proximity in the embedding space and automatically extract putative disease cohorts via a distance threshold. Experimental evaluation shows promising results with average F-score of 0.57 and AUC-ROC of 0.98. However, we noticed that results varied considerably between diseases, thus necessitating further investigation and/or phenotype-specific refinement of the approach before being readily deployed across all diseases.

Indexed as

AlgorithmsCohort StudiesComputational BiologyDiseaseElectronic Health RecordsExpert SystemsHumansMachine LearningPhenotype

Identifiers

PMID29218877
PMCPMC5788312

What OpenQuestion holds

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Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.