Natural Language Processing for Prediction of Chronic Diseases from Electronic Health Records

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive multi-modal artificial intelligence framework for the prediction of disease from electronic health records that integrates ClinicalBERT natural language processing with graph neural networks, temporal modeling and explainability analysis. Using Synthea synthetic EHR dat with SNOMED CT codes from 1,171 patients, our approach combines semantic understanding of clinical narratives with structural modeling of patient-disease-treatment relationships. The system achieves predictive performance with macro-averaged F1 score of 0.4512 and AUC of 0.9071 across six chronic conditions, demonstrating outstanding results for diabetes (F1=0.900) and hypertension (F1=0.949). Novel contributions include temporal progression forecasting over 12-month periods using LSTM-Transformer hybrid architecture and comprehensive explainability framework providing gradient-based feature importance analysis and automated clinical reasoning generation. The frameworks successfully validates synthetic EHR data utility for privacy-preserving healthcare AI development while addressing critical requirements necessary for clinical decision support system.