Integrating biomedical research and electronic health records to create knowledge-based biologically meaningful machine-readable embeddings

Abstract

In order to advance precision medicine, detailed clinical features ought to be described in a way that leverages current knowledge. Although data collected from biomedical research is expanding at an almost exponential rate, our ability to transform that information into patient care has not kept at pace. A major barrier preventing this transformation is that multi-dimensional data collection and analysis is usually carried out without much understanding of the underlying knowledge structure. Here, in an effort to bridge this gap, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of individual patients are connected to a heterogeneous knowledge network called Scalable Precision Medicine Oriented Knowledge Engine (SPOKE). Then an unsupervised machine-learning algorithm creates Propagated SPOKE Entry Vectors (PSEVs) that encode the importance of each SPOKE node for any code in the EHRs. We argue that these results, alongside the natural integration of PSEVs into any EHR machine-learning platform, provide a key step toward precision medicine.

Abstract

The Scalable Precision Medicine Oriented Knowledge Engine (SPOKE) is a heterogeneous knowledge network that integrates information from 29 public databases. Here, Nelson et al. extend SPOKE to embed clinical data from electronic health records to create medically meaningful barcodes for each medical variable.