Trajectory-Aware Clinical Risk Prediction via Severity-Grounded Knowledge Graphs and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract

While Electronic Health Records (EHRs) offer a wealth of clinical data, effectively augmenting a patient's records with heterogeneous external knowledge to predict the patient's clinical risk remains a significant challenge. Existing methods fail to capture disease severity, treatment responses, and nuanced clinical progression, due to data sparsity and the underutilization of unstructured clinical notes. To address these challenges, we propose TRACER (a trajectory-aware and clinically grounded prediction framework) that (1) constructs a medical knowledge graph enriched with severity information from medical literature, (2) retrieves clinically relevant, severity-weighted paths of a patient's progression from the knowledge graph, (3) extracts clinically relevant events from unstructured clinical notes, and (4) augments patient context with similar peer cases. Experiments on the MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV datasets demonstrate large gains over state-of-the-art baselines, with up to 28.5% increase in Macro F1 score for the mortality prediction task, and 19.7% increase for the readmission prediction task.