Predicting patient mortality in the intensive care unit (ICU) is critical for timely and effective clinical decisionmaking. While deep learning models have been increasingly applied to Electronic Health Records (EHR) data, modeling heterogeneous and often incomplete clinical data remains a major challenge. Existing approaches frequently fail to fully capture both modality-specific characteristics and inter-modal correlations across diverse data types. In this Paper, we propose MVAE4EHR, a multimodal variational autoencoder framework that jointly learns modality-specific and shared intermodality representations from heterogeneous EHR data. The model maintains the specificity of individual modalities (e.g., time-series vitals, lab results, static demographics, and clinical notes) while capturing their correlations through a unified latent representation. This dual-objective design enables our framework to produce rich, disentangled, and high-quality representations beneficial for downstream tasks. We evaluate our method on the publicly available MIMIC-III dataset. Our model outperforms unimodal baselines and other multimodal fusion models in mortality prediction, achieving an AUROC of 0.90 and AUPRC of 0.65. Our findings indicate that modeling inter-modality correlations and modality-specific features enhances the predictive performance of mortality prediction models. This method offers a promising path for creating interpretable and effective clinical decision-support tools.

Accurate patient outcome predictions are essential for healthcare improvement, yet utilizing diverse medical data raises privacy and security concerns. Federated learning enables collaborative model training while preserving data privacy. However, the heterogeneity of clinical features among hospitals poses a challenge, leading to suboptimal performance in conventional federated learning. In response, we propose FedComDist, a personalized federated learning approach designed to maximize the use of heterogeneous features across hospitals for patient outcome prediction. Our approach incorporates a novel method for optimizing common global and distinct local parameters. We categorize input clinical features into two main groups-common and distinct-based on their presence across all hospitals and decouple the model parameters into common and distinct accordingly. The common features are used to train common global parameters, which are aggregated and optimized on the server, making them trainable across all hospitals. Meanwhile, the distinct features are used to train local parameters and optimized using the local dataset of each hospital. Our approach is evaluated on the eICU dataset, a publicly available multi-center clinical dataset, to predict patient clinical outcomes, specifically mortality and Length of Stay (LoS). The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to various federated learning methods and provide enhanced privacy through parameter decoupling.

Recent methods of patient clinical outcome prediction focus on embedding the temporal time-series data by sequential data encoders without considering the dependency between the different variables and the static demographics data. To solve this problem and achieve better patient outcome prediction, we propose an attention-based memory fusion (AMF) network with Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) (called GRU-AMFN) to model the dependency between the different time-series and static demographic data and extract effective personalized representation about the patient’s clinical health status. We evaluate our proposed GRU-AMFN method on eICU, a publicly available dataset, to validate its effectiveness for the in-hospital mortality prediction task. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art models for the in-hospital mortality prediction task. Ablation studies show the effectiveness of the proposed attention-based memory fusion module and the adaptive fusion module. Besides, our proposed method finds several static demographic and time-series features that are important for mortality prediction.

With the ever-increasing concern in network security and privacy, a major portion of Internet traffic is encrypted now. Recent research shows that more than 70% of Internet content is transmitted using HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). However, HTTPS encryption eliminates the advantages of many intermediate services like the caching proxy, which can significantly degrade the performance of web content delivery. We argue that these restrictions lead to the need for other mechanisms to access sites quickly and safely. In this paper, we introduce QoS3, which is a protocol that can overcome such limitations by allowing clients to explicitly and securely re-introduce in-network caching proxies using fine-grained trust delegation without compromising the integrity of the HTTPS content and modifying the format of Transport Layer Security (TLS). In QoS3, we classify web page contents into two types: (1) public contents that are common for all users, which can be stored in the caching proxies, and (2) private contents that are specific for each user. Correspondingly, QoS3 establishes two separate TLS connections between the client and the web server for them. Specifically, for private contents, QoS3 just leverages the original HTTPS protocol to deliver them, without involving any middlebox. For public contents, QoS3 allows clients to delegate trust to specific caching proxy along the path, thereby allowing the clients to use the cached contents in the caching proxy via a delegated HTTPS connection. Meanwhile, to prevent Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks on public contents, QoS3 validates the public contents by employing Document object Model (DoM) object-level checksums, which are delivered through the original HTTPS connection. We implement a prototype of QoS3 and evaluate its performance in our testbed. Experimental results show that QoS3 provides acceleration on page load time ranging between 30% and 64% over traditional HTTPS with negligible overhead. Moreover, QoS3 is deployable since it requires just minor software modifications to the server, client, and the middlebox.