Background Automated clinical decision support for risk assessment is a powerful tool in combating cardiovascular disease (CVD), enabling targeted early intervention that could avoid issues of overtreatment or undertreatment. However, current CVD risk prediction models use observations at baseline without explicitly representing patient history as a time series.

Objective The aim of this study is to examine whether by explicitly modelling the temporal dimension of patient history event prediction may be improved.

Methods This study investigates methods for multivariate sequential modelling with a particular emphasis on long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks. Data from a CVD decision support tool is linked to routinely collected national datasets including pharmaceutical dispensing, hospitalization, laboratory test results, and deaths. The study uses a 2-year observation and a 5-year prediction window. Selected methods are applied to the linked dataset. The experiments performed focus on CVD event prediction. CVD death or hospitalization in a 5-year interval was predicted for patients with history of lipid-lowering therapy.

Results The results of the experiments showed temporal models are valuable for CVD event prediction over a 5-year interval. This is especially the case for LSTM, which produced the best predictive performance among all models compared achieving AUROC of 0.801 and average precision of 0.425. The non-temporal model comparator ridge classifier (RC) trained using all quarterly data or by aggregating quarterly data (averaging time-varying features) was highly competitive achieving AUROC of 0.799 and average precision of 0.420 and AUROC of 0.800 and average precision of 0.421, respectively.

Conclusion This study provides evidence that the use of deep temporal models particularly LSTM in clinical decision support for chronic disease would be advantageous with LSTM significantly improving on commonly used regression models such as logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards on the task of CVD event prediction.

Received: 02 March 2022

Accepted: 25 August 2022

Article published online:
23 December 2022

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