Deep Learning Meets Biomedical Ontologies: Knowledge Embeddings for Epilepsy

AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2018 Apr 16:2017:1233-1242. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

While biomedical ontologies have traditionally been used to guide the identification of concepts or relations in biomedical data, recent advances in deep learning are able to capture high-quality knowledge from textual data and represent it in graphical structures. As opposed to the top-down methodology used in the generation of ontologies, which starts with the principled design of the upper ontology, the bottom-up methodology enabled by deep learning encodes the likelihood that concepts share certain relations, as evidenced by data. In this paper, we present a knowledge representation produced by deep learning methods, called Medical Knowledge Embeddings (MKE), that encode medical concepts related to the study of epilepsy and the relations between them. Many of the epilepsy-relevant medical concepts from MKE are not yet available in existing biomedical ontologies, but are mentioned in vast collections of epilepsy-related medical records which also imply their relationships. The evaluation of the MKE indicates high accuracy of the medical concepts automatically identified from clinical text as well as promising results in terms of correctness and completeness of relations produced by deep learning.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Biological Ontologies*
  • Data Accuracy
  • Deep Learning*
  • Electroencephalography*
  • Epilepsy*
  • Humans
  • Medical Records