FlexCare: Leveraging Cross-Task Synergy for Flexible Multimodal Healthcare Prediction

Multimodal electronic health record (EHR) data can offer a holistic assessment of a patient's health status, supporting various predictive healthcare tasks. Recently, several studies have embraced the multitask learning approach in the healthcare domain, exploiting the inherent correlations among clinical tasks to predict multiple outcomes simultaneously. However, existing methods necessitate samples to possess complete labels for all tasks, which places heavy demands on the data and restricts the flexibility of the model. Meanwhile, within a multitask framework with multimodal inputs, how to comprehensively consider the information disparity among modalities and among tasks still remains a challenging problem. To tackle these issues, a unified healthcare prediction model, also named by \textbf{FlexCare}, is proposed to flexibly accommodate incomplete multimodal inputs, promoting the adaption to multiple healthcare tasks. The proposed model breaks the conventional paradigm of parallel multitask prediction by decomposing it into a series of asynchronous single-task prediction. Specifically, a task-agnostic multimodal information extraction module is presented to capture decorrelated representations of diverse intra- and inter-modality patterns. Taking full account of the information disparities between different modalities and different tasks, we present a task-guided hierarchical multimodal fusion module that integrates the refined modality-level representations into an individual patient-level representation. Experimental results on multiple tasks from MIMIC-IV/MIMIC-CXR/MIMIC-NOTE datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Additionally, further analysis underscores the feasibility and potential of employing such a multitask strategy in the healthcare domain. The source code is available at https://github.com/mhxu1998/FlexCare.

Discriminative Feature Learning Framework with Gradient Preference for Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised representation learning has been extensively employed in anomaly detection, achieving impressive performance. Extracting valuable feature vectors that can remarkably improve the performance of anomaly detection are essential in unsupervised representation learning. To this end, we propose a novel discriminative feature learning framework with gradient preference for anomaly detection. Specifically, we firstly design a gradient preference based selector to store powerful feature points in space and then construct a feature repository, which alleviate the interference of redundant feature vectors and improve inference efficiency. To overcome the looseness of feature vectors, secondly, we present a discriminative feature learning with center constrain to map the feature repository to a compact subspace, so that the anomalous samples are more distinguishable from the normal ones. Moreover, our method can be easily extended to anomaly localization. Extensive experiments on popular industrial and medical anomaly detection datasets demonstrate our proposed framework can achieve competitive results in both anomaly detection and localization. More important, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in few shot anomaly detection.