aiqbench analysis
This research introduces MMAP, a novel pretraining framework designed to handle missing modalities in multimodal medical datasets for Alzheimer's disease prediction. By integrating generative reconstruction with contrastive learning, the method robustly learns representations from incomplete image and tabular data, outperforming standard baselines on longitudinal clinical tasks. The work addresses a critical gap in deploying AI models in real-world healthcare settings where data incompleteness is common.
MMAP: Multimodal Missing-Aware Pretraining for Longitudinal Alzheimer's Prediction
arXiv:2609.26617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clinical decision making heavily relies on predicting the disease progression trajectory by seeking to understand patient's health status which is characterised by multimodal medical data. AI holds great potential for learning useful representations from multimodal medical data to predict disease progression and aid clinical decision making. However, development of predictive AI models is constrained by missing modalities and incomplete tabular data frequently occurring in medical datasets. In addition, disease labels alone may only provide limited supervisory signals for learning representations from high-dimensional multimodal data. Here, we present MMAP, a novel Multimodal Missing-aware Alignment Pretraining method for learning image-tabular representations from incomplete data. An image encoder is pretrained with efficient sigmoid contrastive learning combined with generative reconstruction. A tabular encoder is built upon a tabular foundation model. A missing token generator enables the two encoders to take incomplete data as input, enabling the model to be robust against missing modalities, either with missing images or missing tabular data. We evaluate the clinical usefulness of the learnt multimodal representations on two challenging longitudinal clinical tasks for Alzheimer's disease: predicting disease stage conversion and predicting amyloid status. The proposed method outperforms strong multimodal and unimodal baselines.
Abstract:Clinical decision making heavily relies on predicting the disease progression trajectory by seeking to understand patient's health status which is characterised by multimodal medical data. AI holds great potential for learning useful representations from multimodal medical data to predict disease progression and aid clinical decision making. However, development of predictive AI models is constrained by missing modalities and incomplete tabular data frequently occurring in medical datasets. In addition, disease labels alone may only provide limited supervisory signals for learning representations from high-dimensional multimodal data. Here, we present MMAP, a novel Multimodal Missing-aware Alignment Pretraining method for learning image-tabular representations from incomplete data. An image encoder is pretrained with efficient sigmoid contrastive learning combined with generative reconstruction. A tabular encoder is built upon a tabular foundation model. A missing token generator enables the two encoders to take incomplete data as input, enabling the model to be robust against missing modalities, either with missing images or missing tabular data. We evaluate the clinical usefulness of the learnt multimodal representations on two challenging longitudinal clinical tasks for Alzheimer's disease: predicting disease stage conversion and predicting amyloid status. The proposed method outperforms strong multimodal and unimodal baselines.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2609.26617 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2609.26617v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.26617 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 293 words
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