# Doctor AI: Predicting Clinical Events via Recurrent Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.05942 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05942/

## Key facts

- Cited by 208 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 208)

- [Explainable AI (XAI): A Systematic Meta-Survey of Current Challenges and Future Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06420/) (2021)
- [Time Series Prediction using Deep Learning Methods in Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13461/) (2021)
- [Characterizing Fairness Over the Set of Good Models Under Selective Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00352/) (2021)
- [GraphCare: Enhancing Healthcare Predictions with Personalized Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12788/) (2023)
- [SafeDrug: Dual Molecular Graph Encoders for Recommending Effective and Safe Drug Combinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02711/) (2021)
- [Hi-BEHRT: Hierarchical Transformer-based model for accurate prediction of clinical events using multimodal longitudinal electronic health records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11360/) (2021)
- [PLM-ICD: Automatic ICD Coding with Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05289/) (2022)
- [Event Stream GPT: A Data Pre-processing and Modeling Library for Generative, Pre-trained Transformers over Continuous-time Sequences of Complex Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11547/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Large Language Models and Multimodal Large Language Models in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08603/) (2024)
- [GenHPF: General Healthcare Predictive Framework with Multi-task Multi-source Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09858/) (2022)
- [Stable Neural Stochastic Differential Equations in Analyzing Irregular Time Series Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14989/) (2024)
- [Neural Natural Language Processing for Unstructured Data in Electronic Health Records: a Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02975/) (2021)
- [Deep learning for temporal data representation in electronic health records: A systematic review of challenges and methodologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09951/) (2021)
- [Improving Medical Predictions by Irregular Multimodal Electronic Health Records Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12156/) (2022)
- [Heterogeneous Similarity Graph Neural Network on Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06800/) (2021)
- [MUFASA: Multimodal Fusion Architecture Search for Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02340/) (2021)
- [Collaborative Graph Learning with Auxiliary Text for Temporal Event Prediction in Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07542/) (2021)
- [The Shaky Foundations of Clinical Foundation Models: A Survey of Large Language Models and Foundation Models for EMRs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12961/) (2023)
- [How to Leverage Multimodal EHR Data for Better Medical Predictions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15763/) (2021)
- [A Unified Review of Deep Learning for Automated Medical Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02797/) (2022)
- [Towards BERT-based Automatic ICD Coding: Limitations and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06709/) (2021)
- [Unifying Heterogeneous Electronic Health Records Systems via Text-Based Code Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03625/) (2021)
- [TWIN-GPT: Digital Twins for Clinical Trials via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01273/) (2024)
- [PromptEHR: Conditional Electronic Healthcare Records Generation with Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01761/) (2022)
- [Context-aware Health Event Prediction via Transition Functions on Dynamic Disease Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05195/) (2021)
- [CORE-BEHRT: A Carefully Optimized and Rigorously Evaluated BEHRT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15201/) (2024)
- [Comprehensive Review of Neural Differential Equations for Time Series Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09885/) (2025)
- [Self-Supervised Graph Learning with Hyperbolic Embedding for Temporal Health Event Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04751/) (2021)
- [Multimodal data matters: language model pre-training over structured and unstructured electronic health records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10113/) (2022)
- [SurvLatent ODE : A Neural ODE based time-to-event model with competing risks for longitudinal data improves cancer-associated Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09633/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Leveraging large historical data in electronic health record (EHR), we developed Doctor AI, a generic predictive model that covers observed medical conditions and medication uses. Doctor AI is a temporal model using recurrent neural networks (RNN) and was developed and applied to longitudinal time stamped EHR data from 260K patients over 8 years. Encounter records (e.g. diagnosis codes, medication codes or procedure codes) were input to RNN to predict (all) the diagnosis and medication categories for a subsequent visit. Doctor AI assesses the history of patients to make multilabel predictions (one label for each diagnosis or medication category). Based on separate blind test set evaluation, Doctor AI can perform differential diagnosis with up to 79% recall@30, significantly higher than several baselines. Moreover, we demonstrate great generalizability of Doctor AI by adapting the resulting models from one institution to another without losing substantial accuracy.