A deep learning-based multi-turn conversation modeling for diagnostic Q&A document recommendation

摘要

Online healthcare communities (OHCs) have become producers of medical information. Solving the issue of how to effectively reuse such a large amount of medical data and discover its potential value is of the utmost importance for alleviating the shortage of medical resources. Online consultation has received widespread attention and population since its first appearance in 1999, and as a result, many diagnostic multi-turn questions and answers (Q&A) documents have become available. This type of document is formed by multiple rounds of patient questions and doctors’ diagnostic answers and contains massive medical knowledge and doctors’ diagnostic experience. Few studies concentrate on the modeling and recommendation of this type of document, yet making these documents convenient for reuse reduces the cost of medical consultation for patients and saves time addressing common diseases for doctors. In this paper, we focus on the modeling and understanding of diagnostic multi-turn Q&A records and propose a deep-learning recommendation framework based on patient medical information needs, the contents of Q&A records and doctor background information. With the evaluation based on a real dataset that contains pediatric consultation dialogues fetched from DingXiangYuan, a famous online consultation application in China, we found that the proposed model achieved a good performance on the recommendation of diagnostic multi-turn Q&A records and outperformed baseline models. In addition, we discussed a potential application scenario of the recommendation model, suggesting that the proposed model can promote the reduction of patient costs and doctors’ work pressure in countries or regions with insufficient medical resources.