Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Liang, Zhongyuan, Jo, Junhyung, Lee, Hyang-Jung, Kim, Sang Kyu, Chen, Irene Y.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16878
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866917417903456256
author Liang, Zhongyuan
Jo, Junhyung
Lee, Hyang-Jung
Kim, Sang Kyu
Chen, Irene Y.
author_facet Liang, Zhongyuan
Jo, Junhyung
Lee, Hyang-Jung
Kim, Sang Kyu
Chen, Irene Y.
contents Early prediction of severe clinical deterioration and remaining length of stay can enable timely intervention and better resource allocation in high-acuity settings such as the ICU. This has driven the development of machine learning models that leverage continuous streams of vital signs and other physiological signals for real-time risk prediction. Despite their promise, existing methods have important limitations. Contrastive pretraining treats all patients as equally strong negatives, failing to capture clinically meaningful similarity between patients with related diagnoses. Meanwhile, downstream fine-tuning typically ignores complementary modalities such as clinical notes, which provide rich contextual information unavailable in physiological signals alone. To address these challenges, we propose OC-Distill, a two-stage framework that leverages multimodal supervision during training while requiring only vital signs at inference. In the first stage, we introduce an ontology-aware contrastive objective that exploits the ICD hierarchy to quantify patient similarity and learn clinically grounded representations. In the second stage, we fine-tune the pretrained encoder via cross-modal knowledge distillation, transferring complementary information from clinical notes into the model. Across multiple ICU prediction tasks on MIMIC, OC-Distill demonstrates improved label efficiency and achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods that use only vital signs at inference.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_16878
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OC-Distill: Ontology-aware Contrastive Learning with Cross-Modal Distillation for ICU Risk Prediction
Liang, Zhongyuan
Jo, Junhyung
Lee, Hyang-Jung
Kim, Sang Kyu
Chen, Irene Y.
Machine Learning
Early prediction of severe clinical deterioration and remaining length of stay can enable timely intervention and better resource allocation in high-acuity settings such as the ICU. This has driven the development of machine learning models that leverage continuous streams of vital signs and other physiological signals for real-time risk prediction. Despite their promise, existing methods have important limitations. Contrastive pretraining treats all patients as equally strong negatives, failing to capture clinically meaningful similarity between patients with related diagnoses. Meanwhile, downstream fine-tuning typically ignores complementary modalities such as clinical notes, which provide rich contextual information unavailable in physiological signals alone. To address these challenges, we propose OC-Distill, a two-stage framework that leverages multimodal supervision during training while requiring only vital signs at inference. In the first stage, we introduce an ontology-aware contrastive objective that exploits the ICD hierarchy to quantify patient similarity and learn clinically grounded representations. In the second stage, we fine-tune the pretrained encoder via cross-modal knowledge distillation, transferring complementary information from clinical notes into the model. Across multiple ICU prediction tasks on MIMIC, OC-Distill demonstrates improved label efficiency and achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods that use only vital signs at inference.
title OC-Distill: Ontology-aware Contrastive Learning with Cross-Modal Distillation for ICU Risk Prediction
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16878