A matching framework for modeling symptom and medication relationships from clinical notes

Clinical notes are rich free-text data sources containing valuable symptom and medication information. Little research has been done on matching medication information with multiple symptoms information. Such a matching could provide valuable information for patients with multiple syndromes. We propose a Symptom-Medication (Symp-Med) matching framework to model symptom and medication relationships from clinical notes. After extracting symptom and medication concepts, we construct a weighted bipartite graph to represent the relationships between the two groups of concepts. The key is to efficiently answer user's symptom-medication queries using the graph. We formulate this problem as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem. The objectives are to maximize the total edge weight and minimize the number of medication concepts. We first explore a Branch-and-Cut based algorithm. Then, we revise the combinational objective, and propose a Greedy-based algorithm for solving the Symp-Med problem. The Greedy-based algorithm performs better and significantly improves the computational costs.