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Contrastive Learning on Multimodal Analysis of Electronic Health Records

delete2026-07-01
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OA
AI
F
Feiqing Huang
R
Ryumei Nakada
L
Linjun Zhang
D
Doudou Zhou
DOI:10.1080/01621459.2026.2698136delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Electronic health record (EHR) systems capture a wealth of multimodal clinical data, encompassing both structured clinical codes and unstructured clinical notes. Yet, many EHR-focused studies have traditionally examined these modalities in isolation or combined them using simplistic methods, overlooking the intrinsic synergy between them. In reality, these modalities are deeply interconnected, each containing clinically relevant and complementary information that, when integrated effectively, can provide a more comprehensive understanding of patient health. Despite the success of multimodal contrastive learning in vision-language applications, its potential remains under-explored in multimodal EHR, particularly in terms of theoretical understanding. To support statistical analysis of multimodal EHR data, we propose a multimodal feature embedding generative model and design a multimodal contrastive loss to learn EHR feature representations. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of multimodal learning over single-modality learning and connects the solution of the loss function to the singular value decomposition of a pointwise mutual information matrix. This connection leads to a privacy-preserving algorithm tailored for multimodal EHR representation learning. Simulation studies show that the proposed algorithm performs well under a variety of configurations. We further validate its clinical utility using real-world EHR data.
Keywords:
Natural language processing
textual data
structured data
representation learning
singular value decomposition

Journal

J
Journal of the American Statistical Association
IF:
3
Papers:
5.1K
Citations:
4.8W

Organization

R
rutgers university
Scholars:
1.2K
Papers: 697
Citations: 0
H
harvard t.h. chan school of public health
Scholars:
1.1K
Papers: 581
Citations: 2
H
harvard medical school
Scholars:
4.6K
Papers: 2.1K
Citations: 2
N
National University of Singapore
Scholars:
7.4W
Papers: 6.4W
Citations: 11.4W
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