Arbitrary Data as Images: Fusion of Patient Data Across Modalities and Irregular Intervals with Vision Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tölle, Malte, Scharaf, Mohamad, Fischer, Samantha, Reich, Christoph, Zeid, Silav, Dieterich, Christoph, Meder, Benjamin, Frey, Norbert, Wild, Philipp, Engelhardt, Sandy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tölle, Malte
Scharaf, Mohamad
Fischer, Samantha
Reich, Christoph
Zeid, Silav
Dieterich, Christoph
Meder, Benjamin
Frey, Norbert
Wild, Philipp
Engelhardt, Sandy
author_facet Tölle, Malte
Scharaf, Mohamad
Fischer, Samantha
Reich, Christoph
Zeid, Silav
Dieterich, Christoph
Meder, Benjamin
Frey, Norbert
Wild, Philipp
Engelhardt, Sandy
contents A patient undergoes multiple examinations in each hospital stay, where each provides different facets of the health status. These assessments include temporal data with varying sampling rates, discrete single-point measurements, therapeutic interventions such as medication administration, and images. While physicians are able to process and integrate diverse modalities intuitively, neural networks need specific modeling for each modality complicating the training procedure. We demonstrate that this complexity can be significantly reduced by visualizing all information as images along with unstructured text and subsequently training a conventional vision-text transformer. Our approach, Vision Transformer for irregular sampled Multi-modal Measurements (ViTiMM), not only simplifies data preprocessing and modeling but also outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in predicting in-hospital mortality and phenotyping, as evaluated on 6,175 patients from the MIMIC-IV dataset. The modalities include patient's clinical measurements, medications, X-ray images, and electrocardiography scans. We hope our work inspires advancements in multi-modal medical AI by reducing the training complexity to (visual) prompt engineering, thus lowering entry barriers and enabling no-code solutions for training. The source code will be made publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_18237
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Arbitrary Data as Images: Fusion of Patient Data Across Modalities and Irregular Intervals with Vision Transformers
Tölle, Malte
Scharaf, Mohamad
Fischer, Samantha
Reich, Christoph
Zeid, Silav
Dieterich, Christoph
Meder, Benjamin
Frey, Norbert
Wild, Philipp
Engelhardt, Sandy
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
A patient undergoes multiple examinations in each hospital stay, where each provides different facets of the health status. These assessments include temporal data with varying sampling rates, discrete single-point measurements, therapeutic interventions such as medication administration, and images. While physicians are able to process and integrate diverse modalities intuitively, neural networks need specific modeling for each modality complicating the training procedure. We demonstrate that this complexity can be significantly reduced by visualizing all information as images along with unstructured text and subsequently training a conventional vision-text transformer. Our approach, Vision Transformer for irregular sampled Multi-modal Measurements (ViTiMM), not only simplifies data preprocessing and modeling but also outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in predicting in-hospital mortality and phenotyping, as evaluated on 6,175 patients from the MIMIC-IV dataset. The modalities include patient's clinical measurements, medications, X-ray images, and electrocardiography scans. We hope our work inspires advancements in multi-modal medical AI by reducing the training complexity to (visual) prompt engineering, thus lowering entry barriers and enabling no-code solutions for training. The source code will be made publicly available.
title Arbitrary Data as Images: Fusion of Patient Data Across Modalities and Irregular Intervals with Vision Transformers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.18237