Graph Neural Network on Electronic Health Records for Predicting Alzheimer's Disease

The cause of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is poorly understood, so forecasting AD remains a hard task in population health. Failure of clinical trials for AD treatments indicates that AD should be intervened at the earlier, pre-symptomatic stages. Developing an explainable method for predicting AD is critical for providing better treatment targets, better clinical trial recruitment, and better clinical care for the AD patients. In this paper, we present a novel approach for disease (AD) prediction based on Electronic Health Records (EHR) and graph neural network. Our method improves the performance on sparse data which is common in EHR, and obtains state-of-art results in predicting AD 12 to 24 months in advance on real-world EHR data, compared to other baseline results. Our approach also provides an insight into the structural relationship among different diagnosis, Lab values, and procedures from EHR as per graph structures learned by our model.