Multimodal medical tensor fusion network-based DL framework for abnormality prediction from the radiology CXRs and clinical text reports

Pulmonary disease is a commonly occurring abnormality throughout this world. The pulmonary diseases include Tuberculosis, Pneumothorax, Cardiomegaly, Pulmonary atelectasis, Pneumonia, etc. A timely prognosis of pulmonary disease is essential. Increasing progress in Deep Learning (DL) techniques has significantly impacted and contributed to the medical domain, specifically in leveraging medical imaging for analysis, prognosis, and therapeutic decisions for clinicians. Many contemporary DL strategies for radiology focus on a single modality of data utilizing imaging features without considering the clinical context that provides more valuable complementary information for clinically consistent prognostic decisions. Also, the selection of the best data fusion strategy is crucial when performing Machine Learning (ML) or DL operation on multimodal heterogeneous data. We investigated multimodal medical fusion strategies leveraging DL techniques to predict pulmonary abnormality from the heterogeneous radiology Chest X-Rays (CXRs) and clinical text reports. In this research, we have proposed two effective unimodal and multimodal subnetworks to predict pulmonary abnormality from the CXR and clinical reports. We have conducted a comprehensive analysis and compared the performance of unimodal and multimodal models. The proposed models were applied to standard augmented data and the synthetic data generated to check the model’s ability to predict from the new and unseen data. The proposed models were thoroughly assessed and examined against the publicly available Indiana university dataset and the data collected from the private medical hospital. The proposed multimodal models have given superior results compared to the unimodal models.