A Predictive Text System for Medical Recommendations in Telemedicine: A Deep Learning Approach in the Arabic Context

Abstract

We are currently witnessing an immense proliferation of natural language processing (NLP) applications. Natural language generation (NLG) has emerged from NLP and is now commonly utilized in various applications, including chatting applications. The objective of this paper is to propose a deep learning-based language generation model that simplifies the process of writing medical recommendations for doctors in an Arabic context, to improve service satisfaction and patient-doctor interactions. The developed language generation model is a predictive text system intended for next word prediction in a telemedicine service. Altibbi—a digital platform for telemedicine and teleconsultations services in the Middle East and the North Africa (MENA) region—was utilized as a case study for the textual prediction process. The proposed model was trained using data obtained from Altibbi databases related to medical recommendations, particularly gynecology, dermatology, psychiatric diseases, urology, and internist diseases. Variants of deep learning models were implemented and optimized for next word prediction, based on the unidirectional and bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM and BiLSTM), the one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CONV1D), and a combination of LSTM and CONV1D (LSTM-CONV1D). The algorithms were trained using two versions of the datasets (i.e., 3-gram and 4-gram representations) and evaluated in terms of their training accuracy and loss, validation accuracy and loss, and testing accuracy per their matching scores. The proposed models’ performances were comparable. CONV1D produced the most promising matching score.

Keywords

• Altibbi
• natural language processing
• deep learning
• telemedicine
• Arabic
• predictive text