# Preoperative Prognosis Assessment of Lumbar Spinal Surgery for Low Back Pain and Sciatica Patients based on Multimodalities and Multimodal Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.09085 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09085/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15779/) (2020)
- [RadFusion: Benchmarking Performance and Fairness for Multimodal Pulmonary Embolism Detection from CT and EHR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11665/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Low back pain (LBP) and sciatica may require surgical therapy when they are symptomatic of severe pain. However, there is no effective measures to evaluate the surgical outcomes in advance. This work combined elements of Eastern medicine and machine learning, and developed a preoperative assessment tool to predict the prognosis of lumbar spinal surgery in LBP and sciatica patients. Standard operative assessments, traditional Chinese medicine body constitution assessments, planned surgical approach, and vowel pronunciation recordings were collected and stored in different modalities. Our work provides insights into leveraging modality combinations, multimodals, and fusion strategies. The interpretability of models and correlations between modalities were also inspected. Based on the recruited 105 patients, we found that combining standard operative assessments, body constitution assessments, and planned surgical approach achieved the best performance in 0.81 accuracy. Our approach is effective and can be widely applied in general practice due to simplicity and effective.