Translating non-invasive signals such as photoplethysmography (PPG) and ballistocardiography (BCG) into clinically meaningful signals like arterial blood pressure (ABP) is vital for continuous, low-cost healthcare monitoring. However, temporal misalignment in multimodal signal transformation impairs transformation accuracy, especially in capturing critical features like ABP peaks. Conventional synchronization methods often rely on strong similarity assumptions or manual tuning, while existing Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) approaches are ineffective under time-shifted supervision, either discarding excessive data or failing to correct label shifts. To address this challenge, we propose ShiftSyncNet, a meta-learning-based bi-level optimization framework that automatically mitigates performance degradation due to time misalignment. It comprises a transformation network (TransNet) and a time-shift correction network (SyncNet), where SyncNet learns time offsets between training pairs and applies Fourier phase shifts to align supervision signals. Experiments on one real-world industrial dataset and two public datasets show that ShiftSyncNet outperforms strong baselines by 9.4%, 6.0%, and 12.8%, respectively. The results highlight its effectiveness in correcting time shifts, improving label quality, and enhancing transformation accuracy across diverse misalignment scenarios, pointing toward a unified direction for addressing temporal inconsistencies in multimodal physiological transformation.

Hypertension is a leading risk factor for cardiovascular diseases. Traditional blood pressure monitoring methods are cumbersome and inadequate for continuous tracking, prompting the development of PPG-based cuffless blood pressure monitoring wearables. This study leverages deep learning models, including ResNet and Transformer, to analyze wrist PPG data collected with a smartwatch for efficient hypertension risk screening, eliminating the need for handcrafted PPG features. Using the Home Blood Pressure Monitoring (HBPM) longitudinal dataset of 448 subjects and five-fold cross-validation, our model was trained on over 68k spot-check instances from 358 subjects and tested on real-world continuous recordings of 90 subjects. The compact ResNet model with 0.124M parameters performed significantly better than traditional machine learning methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in distinguishing between healthy and abnormal cases in real-world scenarios.

Arterial blood pressure (ABP) holds substantial promise for proactive cardiovascular health management. Notwithstanding its potential, the invasive nature of ABP measurements confines their utility primarily to clinical environments, limiting their applicability for continuous monitoring beyond medical facilities. The conversion of photoplethysmography (PPG) signals into ABP equivalents has garnered significant attention due to its potential in revolutionizing cardiovascular disease management. Recent strides in PPG-to-ABP prediction encompass the integration of generative and discriminative models. Despite these advances, the efficacy of these models is curtailed by the latent space shift predicament, stemming from alterations in PPG data distribution across disparate hardware and individuals, potentially leading to distorted ABP waveforms. To tackle this problem, we present an innovative solution named the Latent Space Constraint Transformer (LSCT), leveraging a quantized codebook to yield robust latent spaces by employing multiple discretizing bases. To facilitate improved reconstruction, the Correlation-boosted Attention Module (CAM) is introduced to systematically query pertinent bases on a global scale. Furthermore, to enhance expressive capacity, we propose the Multi-Spectrum Enhancement Knowledge (MSEK), which fosters local information flow within the channels of latent code and provides additional embedding for reconstruction. Through comprehensive experimentation on both publicly available datasets and a private downstream task dataset, the proposed approach demonstrates noteworthy performance enhancements compared to existing methods. Extensive ablation studies further substantiate the effectiveness of each introduced module.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the critical diagnostic tools in healthcare. Various deep learning models, except Transformers, have been explored and applied to map ECG patterns to heart abnormalities. Transformer models have been adopted from natural language processing to computer vision with advanced features. Most recently, vision transformers show exceptional performances, even on moderate-scale datasets. However, naively applying vision transformers on electrocardiogram datasets leads to poor results. In this paper, we propose a novel network called Beat-aligned Transformer (BaT), a hierarchical Transformer that sufficiently exploits the cyclicity of ECG. We organize and treat an input ECG as multiple aligned beats instead of a single time series. In the BaT, shifted-window-based Transformer blocks (SW Block) are adopted to learn the representation for each beat, and aggregation blocks are designed to exchange information among the beat representations. Nested SW Blocks and aggregation blocks form a beat-aware hierarchical structure of BaT. In this way, the new data format and the BaT hierarchical structure boost Transformer performance on ECG classification. From the experiments on public ECG datasets, we observe BaT outperforms other Transformer-based models and achieves competitive performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) provide the best of class solutions to many supervised tasks due to their powerful function fitting capabilities. However, it is challenging to handle data bias, such as label noise and class imbalance, when applying DNNs to solve real-world problems. Sample reweighting is a popular strategy to tackle data bias, which assigns higher weights to informative samples or samples with clean labels. However, conventional reweighting methods require prior knowledge of the distribution information of data bias, which is intractable in practice. In recent years, meta-learning-based methods have been proposed to learn to assign weights to training samples adaptively by using their online training loss or gradient directions. However, the latent bias distribution cannot be adequately characterized in an online fashion. The online loss distribution changes over the training procedure, making it even harder to perform the sample weight learning. In contrast to past methods, we propose a two-stage training strategy to tackle the above problems. In the first stage, the loss sequences of samples are collected. In the second stage, a subnet with convolutional layers is utilized to learn the mapping from offline sample loss sequence to sample weight adaptively. Guided by a small unbiased meta dataset, this subnet is optimized iteratively with the main classifier network in a meta-learning manner. Empirical results show that our method, called Meta Reweighting with Offline Loss Sequence (MROLS), outperforms state-of-the-art reweighting techniques on most benchmarks. Moreover, the weights of training samples learned via MROLS can be well utilized by other classifiers, which can directly enhance the standard training schema. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Neronjust2017/MROLS.

Hand-crafted features have been proven useful in solving the electrocardiograph~(ECG) classification problem. The features rely on domain knowledge and carry clinical meanings. However, the construction of the features requires tedious fine tuning in practice. Lately, a set of end-to-end deep neural network models have been proposed and show promising results in ECG classification. Though effective, such models learn patterns which usually mismatch human's concept, and thereby it is hard to get a convincing explanation with interpretation methods. This limitation significantly narrows the applicability of deep models, considering it is difficult for cardiologists to accept the unexplainable results from deep learning. To alleviate such limitation, we are bringing the best from the two worlds and propose a domain knowledge guided deep neural network. Specifically, we utilize a deep residual network as a classification framework, within which key feature ~(P-wave and R-peak position) reconstruction tasks are adopted to incorporate domain knowledge in the learning process. The reconstruction tasks make the model pay more attention to key feature points within ECG. Furthermore, we utilize occlusion method to get visual interpretation and design a visualization at both heartbeat level and feature point level. Our experiments show the superior performance of the proposed ECG classification methods compared to the model without P-wave and R-peak tasks, and the patterns learnt by our model is more explainable.

Electroencephalogram(EEG) is a test that detect brain activities using multiple electrodes placed on the scalp. Multiple channels of EEG signals are recorded through the electrodes and are widely used in applications such as neurological disease diagnosis, emotion recognition, and behavior modeling. Recently, deep learning methods have been applied to classify EEG signals, where the different EEG channels are almost treated as a 2D grid input to the machine learning model. This data formation doesn't consider The complex connection among the EEG channels is not considered in such data formation. In our work, we treat EEG signals as frames of graph, and propose an end-to-end edge-aware spatio-temporal graph convolutional neural network for EEG classification. Specifically, we iteratively apply graph convolutional layer spatially and standard convolutional layer temporally. Since there is no prior knowledge about the exact connection among EEG channels, in our model, we initialize the connection as complete graph and apply learnable mask to capture graph structure at different levels. Furthermore, we also propose an iterative method based on information aggregation in graph convolution mechanism to reveal the latent graph structure. Empirical evaluation shows that our model achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods for EEG classification, and the learnt and revealed latent EEG graph structure is verified to be meaningful by neuroscientists.

Medical images are widely used in the medical domain for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Reading a medical image and summarizing its insights is a routine, yet nonetheless time-consuming task, which often represents a bottleneck in the clinical diagnosis process. Automatic report generation can relieve the issues. However, generating medical reports presents two major challenges: (i) it is hard to accurately detect all the abnormalities simultaneously, especially the rare diseases; (ii) a medical image report consists of many paragraphs and sentences, which are longer than natural image captions. We present a new framework to accurately detect the abnormalities and automatically generate medical reports. The report generation model is based on hierarchical recurrent neural network (HRNN). We introduce a topic matching mechanism to HRNN, so as to make generated reports more accurate and diverse. The soft attention mechanism is also introduced to HRNN model. Experimental results on two image-paragraph pair datasets show that our framework outperforms all the state-of-art methods.

Lately, thanks to the huge amount of Electronic Health Records (EHR) data, deep learning models have been successfully applied to a variety of clinical prediction problems. Existing state-of-the-art clinical predicting models are usually built with recurrent neural network (RNN) and attention mechanism. However, such RNN based approaches mainly suffer from three limitations on clinical predictions, which if addressed would significantly widen their applicability. (i) Accuracy: The performance of RNN based models drops fast when the length of EHR sequences increases. (ii) Interpretability: The prediction results of RNN based models are hard to interpret due to the nature of deep models. (iii) Efficiency: The sequential property of RNN based models makes the parallelization of computation impossible, and accordingly hurts the efficiency of such models in practice. In this paper, we propose an efficient attention-based model to address the above three challenges simultaneously. In the context of heart failure prediction task, we demonstrate the interpretation capability of our model by visualizing relative connections between events and prediction result, and the high computational efficiency comparing to other baseline methods. Meanwhile, we show that the accuracy of our prediction model is comparable or better than those of other state-of-the-art prediction models in healthcare applications.

The need for short-text classification arises in many text mining applications particularly health care applications. In such applications shorter texts mean linguistic ambiguity limits the semantic expression, which in turns would make typical methods fail to capture the exact semantics of the scarce words. This is particularly true in health care domains when the text contains domain-specific or infrequently appearing words, whose embedding can not be easily learned due to the lack of training data. Deep neural network has shown great potentials in boost the performance of such problems according to its strength on representation capacity. In this paper, we propose a bidirectional long short-term memory (BI-LSTM) recurrent network to address the short-text classification problem that can be used in two settings. Firstly when a knowledge dictionary is available we adopt the well-known attention mechanism to guide the training of network using the domain knowledge in the dictionary. Secondly, to address the cases when domain knowledge dictionary is not available, we present a multi-task model to jointly learn the domain knowledge dictionary and do the text classification task simultaneously. We apply our method to a real-world interactive healthcare system and an extensively public available ATIS dataset. The results show that our model can positively grasp the key point of the text and significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art baselines.

Active learning aims to reduce manual labeling efforts by proactively selecting the most informative unlabeled instances to query. In real-world scenarios, it's often more practical to query a batch of instances rather than a single one at each iteration. To achieve this we need to keep not only the informativeness of the instances but also their diversity. Many heuristic methods have been proposed to tackle batch mode active learning problems, however, they suffer from two limitations which if addressed would significantly improve the query strategy. Firstly, the similarity amongst instances is simply calculated using the feature vectors rather than being jointly learned with the classification model. This weakens the accuracy of the diversity measurement. Secondly, these methods usually exploit the decision boundary by querying the data points close to it. However, this can be inefficient when the labeled set is too small to reveal the true boundary. In this paper, we address both limitations by proposing a deep neural network based algorithm. In the training phase, a pairwise deep network is not only trained to perform classification, but also to project data points into another space, where the similarity can be more precisely measured. In the query selection phase, the learner selects a set of instances that are maximally uncertain and minimally redundant (exploitation), as well as are most diverse from the labeled instances (exploration). We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method on a variety of classification tasks: MNIST classification, opinion polarity detection, and heart failure prediction. Our method outperforms the baselines with both higher classification accuracy and faster convergence rate.