Med-MGF: multi-level graph-based framework for handling medical data imbalance and representation.

backgroundModeling patient data, particularly electronic health records (EHR), is one of the major focuses of machine learning studies in healthcare, as these records provide clinicians with valuable information that can potentially assist them in disease diagnosis and decision-making.

methodsIn this study, we present a multi-level graph-based framework called MedMGF, which models both patient medical profiles extracted from EHR data and their relationship network of health profiles in a single architecture. The medical profiles consist of several layers of data embedding derived from interval records obtained during hospitalization, and the patient-patient network is created by measuring the similarities between these profiles. We also propose a modification to the Focal Loss (FL) function to improve classification performance in imbalanced datasets without the need to imputate the data. MedMGF's performance was evaluated against several Graphical Convolutional Network (GCN) baseline models implemented with Binary Cross Entropy (BCE), FL, class balancing parameter

resultsOur proposed framework achieved high classification performance (AUC: 0.8098, ACC: 0.7503, SEN: 0.8750, SPE: 0.7445, NPV: 0.9923, PPV: 0.1367) on an extreme imbalanced pediatric sepsis dataset (n=3,014, imbalance ratio of 0.047). It yielded a classification improvement of 3.81% for AUC, 15% for SEN compared to the baseline GCN+

conclusionWhen compared to all baseline models, MedMGF achieved the highest SEN and AUC results, demonstrating the potential for several healthcare applications.