Has Multimodal Learning Delivered Universal Intelligence in Healthcare? A Comprehensive Survey

The rapid development of artificial intelligence has constantly reshaped the field of intelligent healthcare and medicine. As a vital technology, multimodal learning has increasingly garnered interest due to data complementarity, comprehensive modeling form, and great application potential. Currently, numerous researchers are dedicating their attention to this field, conducting extensive studies and constructing abundant intelligent systems. Naturally, an open question arises that has multimodal learning delivered universal intelligence in healthcare? To answer the question, we adopt three unique viewpoints for a holistic analysis. Firstly, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the current progress of medical multimodal learning from the perspectives of datasets, task-oriented methods, and universal foundation models. Based on them, we further discuss the proposed question from five issues to explore the real impacts of advanced techniques in healthcare, from data and technologies to performance and ethics. The answer is that current technologies have NOT achieved universal intelligence and there remains a significant journey to undertake. Finally, in light of the above reviews and discussions, we point out ten potential directions for exploration towards the goal of universal intelligence in healthcare.

ST-USleepNet: A Spatial-Temporal Coupling Prominence Network for Multi-Channel Sleep Staging

Sleep staging is critical for assessing sleep quality and diagnosing disorders. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have driven the development of automated sleep staging models, which still face two significant challenges. 1) Simultaneously extracting prominent temporal and spatial sleep features from multi-channel raw signals, including characteristic sleep waveforms and salient spatial brain networks. 2) Capturing the spatial-temporal coupling patterns essential for accurate sleep staging. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework named ST-USleepNet, comprising a spatial-temporal graph construction module (ST) and a U-shaped sleep network (USleepNet). The ST module converts raw signals into a spatial-temporal graph to model spatial-temporal couplings. The USleepNet utilizes a U-shaped structure originally designed for image segmentation. Similar to how image segmentation isolates significant targets, when applied to both raw sleep signals and ST module-generated graph data, USleepNet segments these inputs to extract prominent temporal and spatial sleep features simultaneously. Testing on three datasets demonstrates that ST-USleepNet outperforms existing baselines, and model visualizations confirm its efficacy in extracting prominent sleep features and temporal-spatial coupling patterns across various sleep stages. The code is available at: https://github.com/Majy-Yuji/ST-USleepNet.git.

Language Modeling on Tabular Data: A Survey of Foundations, Techniques and Evolution

Tabular data, a prevalent data type across various domains, presents unique challenges due to its heterogeneous nature and complex structural relationships. Achieving high predictive performance and robustness in tabular data analysis holds significant promise for numerous applications. Influenced by recent advancements in natural language processing, particularly transformer architectures, new methods for tabular data modeling have emerged. Early techniques concentrated on pre-training transformers from scratch, often encountering scalability issues. Subsequently, methods leveraging pre-trained language models like BERT have been developed, which require less data and yield enhanced performance. The recent advent of large language models, such as GPT and LLaMA, has further revolutionized the field, facilitating more advanced and diverse applications with minimal fine-tuning. Despite the growing interest, a comprehensive survey of language modeling techniques for tabular data remains absent. This paper fills this gap by providing a systematic review of the development of language modeling for tabular data, encompassing: (1) a categorization of different tabular data structures and data types; (2) a review of key datasets used in model training and tasks used for evaluation; (3) a summary of modeling techniques including widely-adopted data processing methods, popular architectures, and training objectives; (4) the evolution from adapting traditional Pre-training/Pre-trained language models to the utilization of large language models; (5) an identification of persistent challenges and potential future research directions in language modeling for tabular data analysis. GitHub page associated with this survey is available at: https://github.com/lanxiang1017/Language-Modeling-on-Tabular-Data-Survey.git.

Deep Learning with Information Fusion and Model Interpretation for Health Monitoring of Fetus based on Long-term Prenatal Electronic Fetal Heart Rate Monitoring Data

Long-term fetal heart rate (FHR) monitoring during the antepartum period, increasingly popularized by electronic FHR monitoring, represents a growing approach in FHR monitoring. This kind of continuous monitoring, in contrast to the short-term one, collects an extended period of fetal heart data. This offers a more comprehensive understanding of fetus's conditions. However, the interpretation of long-term antenatal fetal heart monitoring is still in its early stages, lacking corresponding clinical standards. Furthermore, the substantial amount of data generated by continuous monitoring imposes a significant burden on clinical work when analyzed manually. To address above challenges, this study develops an automatic analysis system named LARA (Long-term Antepartum Risk Analysis system) for continuous FHR monitoring, combining deep learning and information fusion methods. LARA's core is a well-established convolutional neural network (CNN) model. It processes long-term FHR data as input and generates a Risk Distribution Map (RDM) and Risk Index (RI) as the analysis results. We evaluate LARA on inner test dataset, the performance metrics are as follows: AUC 0.872, accuracy 0.816, specificity 0.811, sensitivity 0.806, precision 0.271, and F1 score 0.415. In our study, we observe that long-term FHR monitoring data with higher RI is more likely to result in adverse outcomes (p=0.0021). In conclusion, this study introduces LARA, the first automated analysis system for long-term FHR monitoring, initiating the further explorations into its clinical value in the future.