DRR: Global Context-Aware Neural Network Using Disease Relationship Reasoning and Attention-Based Feature Fusion

The prediction of future disease development based on past diagnosis records has gained significant attention due to the growing health awareness among individuals. Recent deep learning-based methods have successfully predicted disease development by establishing relationships for each diagnosis record and extracting features from a patient’s past diagnoses in chronological order. However, most of these models have ignored the connections between identified diseases and low-risk diseases, leading to bottlenecks and limitations. In addition, the extraction of temporal characteristics is also hindered by the problem of global feature forgetting. To address these issues, we propose a global context-aware net using disease relationship reasoning and attention-based feature fusion, abbreviated as DRR. Our model incorporates a disease relationship reasoning module that enhances the model’s attention to the relationship between confirmed diseases and low-risk diseases, thereby alleviating the current model’s bottlenecks. Moreover, we have established a global graph-based feature fusion module that integrates global graph-based features with temporal features, mitigating the issue of global feature forgetting. Extensive experiments were conducted on two publicly available datasets, and the experiments show that our method achieves advanced performance.