2026/10/10
Mohammad Tanhaei

Mohammad Tanhaei

Academic rank: Assistant Professor
ORCID: Link
Education: PhD.
ResearchGate: Link
Faculty: Engineering
ScholarId: Link
E-mail: m.tanhaei [at] ilam.ac.ir
ScopusId: Link
Phone:
H-Index: 4

Research

Title
Neuro-symbolic path reasoning with medical knowledge and socio-economic constraints for explainable physician recommendation
Type
JournalPaper
Keywords
Recommender systems, Neuro-symbolic AI, Knowledge graphs, Explainable AI (XAI), Health equity, Telemedicine, Persian NLP
Year
2026
Journal Discover Applied Sciences
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s42452-026-08959-6
Researchers Mohammad Tanhaei

Abstract

Healthcare recommender systems often prioritize clinical relevance while underrepresenting socio-economic determinants of health, such as affordability, insurance coverage, and geographical accessibility. This limitation can produce clinically plausible but practically inaccessible physician recommendations. To address this problem, this study proposes a Neuro-Symbolic Path Reasoning (NSPR) framework for explainable physician recommendation. NSPR integrates semantic entity linking, knowledge graph path reasoning, and explicit constraint satisfaction modeling within a Multi-Constraint Knowledge Graph (MC-KG). The MC-KG was constructed from anonymized BioVisit telemedicine data, including 5000 patient queries, 500 physician profiles, and approximately 28,000 medical and constraint-related nodes. Patient queries are mapped to symptom entities using a fine-tuned biomedical language model, while candidate physicians are ranked through path-based semantic relevance and socio-economic feasibility functions. The final ranking score combines TransE-based path plausibility with constraint satisfaction terms for cost, location, and insurance compatibility. Experimental results indicate that NSPR achieves competitive ranking performance, with an NDCG@10 of 0.82, while reducing Cost Alignment Error (CAE) by 45% relative to Neural Collaborative Filtering. The framework also improves provider exposure fairness by reducing the Gini Index to 0.41 and achieves an explanation fidelity score of 4.2/5 in clinician evaluation. Ablation analysis indicates that constraint modeling is essential for reducing financial toxicity, whereas knowledge graph reasoning is necessary for maintaining clinical relevance. These findings indicate that NSPR provides a transparent and constraint-aware recommendation framework that balances medical relevance, accessibility, and fairness. They further suggest that neuro-symbolic reasoning can support more trustworthy and equitable physician recommendation in telemedicine settings.