A Deep Learning–Based Unsupervised Method to Impute Missing Values in Patient Records for Improved Management of Cardiovascular Patients

Abstract

Physicians increasingly depend on electronic health records (EHRs) to manage their patients. However, many patient records have substantial missing values that pose a fundamental challenge to their clinical use. To address this prevailing challenge, we propose an unsupervised deep learning-based method that can facilitate physicians' use of EHRs to improve their management of cardiovascular patients. By building on the deep autoencoder framework, we develop a novel method to impute missing values in patient records. To demonstrate its clinical applicability and values, we use data from cardiovascular patients and evaluate the proposed method's imputation effectiveness and predictive efficacy, in comparison with six prevalent benchmark techniques. The proposed method can impute missing values and predict important patient outcomes more effectively than all the benchmark techniques. This study reinforces the importance of adequately addressing missing values in patient records. It further illustrates how effective imputations can enable greater predictive efficacy with regard to important patient outcomes, which are crucial to the use of EHRs and health analytics for improved patient management. Supported by the complete data imputed by the proposed method, physicians can make timely patient outcome estimations (predictions) and therapeutic treatment assessments.

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