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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04485 |
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| _version_ | 1866915480084676608 |
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| author | Sainsbury, Chris Karwath, Andreas |
| author_facet | Sainsbury, Chris Karwath, Andreas |
| contents | We present ASCENDgpt, a transformer-based model specifically designed for cardiovascular risk prediction from longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs). Our approach introduces a novel phenotype-aware tokenization scheme that maps 47,155 raw ICD codes to 176 clinically meaningful phenotype tokens, achieving 99.6\% consolidation of diagnosis codes while preserving semantic information. This phenotype mapping contributes to a total vocabulary of 10,442 tokens - a 77.9\% reduction when compared with using raw ICD codes directly. We pretrain ASCENDgpt on sequences derived from 19402 unique individuals using a masked language modeling objective, then fine-tune for time-to-event prediction of five cardiovascular outcomes: myocardial infarction (MI), stroke, major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE), cardiovascular death, and all-cause mortality. Our model achieves excellent discrimination on the held-out test set with an average C-index of 0.816, demonstrating strong performance across all outcomes (MI: 0.792, stroke: 0.824, MACE: 0.800, cardiovascular death: 0.842, all-cause mortality: 0.824). The phenotype-based approach enables clinically interpretable predictions while maintaining computational efficiency. Our work demonstrates the effectiveness of domain-specific tokenization and pretraining for EHR-based risk prediction tasks. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_04485 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | ASCENDgpt: A Phenotype-Aware Transformer Model for Cardiovascular Risk Prediction from Electronic Health Records Sainsbury, Chris Karwath, Andreas Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence We present ASCENDgpt, a transformer-based model specifically designed for cardiovascular risk prediction from longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs). Our approach introduces a novel phenotype-aware tokenization scheme that maps 47,155 raw ICD codes to 176 clinically meaningful phenotype tokens, achieving 99.6\% consolidation of diagnosis codes while preserving semantic information. This phenotype mapping contributes to a total vocabulary of 10,442 tokens - a 77.9\% reduction when compared with using raw ICD codes directly. We pretrain ASCENDgpt on sequences derived from 19402 unique individuals using a masked language modeling objective, then fine-tune for time-to-event prediction of five cardiovascular outcomes: myocardial infarction (MI), stroke, major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE), cardiovascular death, and all-cause mortality. Our model achieves excellent discrimination on the held-out test set with an average C-index of 0.816, demonstrating strong performance across all outcomes (MI: 0.792, stroke: 0.824, MACE: 0.800, cardiovascular death: 0.842, all-cause mortality: 0.824). The phenotype-based approach enables clinically interpretable predictions while maintaining computational efficiency. Our work demonstrates the effectiveness of domain-specific tokenization and pretraining for EHR-based risk prediction tasks. |
| title | ASCENDgpt: A Phenotype-Aware Transformer Model for Cardiovascular Risk Prediction from Electronic Health Records |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04485 |