Résumé: Survival analysis exhibits profound effects on health service management. Traditional approaches for survival analysis have a pre-assumption on the time-to-event probability distribution and seldom consider sequential visits of patients on medical facilities. Although recent studies leverage the merits of deep learning techniques to capture non-linear features and longterm dependencies within multiple visits for survival analysis, the lack of interpretability prevents deep learning models from being applied to clinical practice. To address this challenge, this article proposes a novel attention-based deep recurrent model, named AttenSurv, for clinical survival analysis. Specifically, a global attention mechanism is proposed to extract essential/ critical risk factors for interpretability improvement. Thereafter, Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory is employed to capture the long-term dependency on data from a series of visits of patients. To further improve both the prediction performance and the interpretability of the proposed model, we propose another model, named GNNAttenSurv, by incorporating a graph neural network into AttenSurv, to extract the latent correlations between risk factors. We validated our solution on three public follow-up datasets and two electronic health record datasets. The results demonstrated that our proposed models yielded consistent improvement compared to the state-of-the-art baselines on survival analysis.

Langue: Anglais