# CTPD: Cross-Modal Temporal Pattern Discovery for Enhanced Multimodal Electronic Health Records Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00696 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00696/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15055/) (2020)
- [Recurrent Neural Networks for Multivariate Time Series with Missing Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01865/) (2016)
- [TS2Vec: Towards Universal Representation of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10466/) (2021)
- [Multitask learning and benchmarking with clinical time series data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07771/) (2017)
- [Multi-Time Attention Networks for Irregularly Sampled Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10318/) (2021)
- [Time2Vec: Learning a Vector Representation of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05321/) (2019)
- [Set Functions for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12064/) (2019)
- [MMTM: Multimodal Transfer Module for CNN Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08670/) (2019)
- [Well-Read Students Learn Better: On the Importance of Pre-training Compact Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08962/) (2019)
- [Graph-Guided Network for Irregularly Sampled Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05357/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Transformers for Long Document Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10781/) (2019)
- [Interpolation-Prediction Networks for Irregularly Sampled Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07782/) (2019)
- [Generalization in NLI: Ways (Not) To Go Beyond Simple Heuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01518/) (2021)
- [A Prototype-Oriented Framework for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12024/) (2021)
- [Warpformer: A Multi-scale Modeling Approach for Irregular Clinical Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09368/) (2023)
- [DrFuse: Learning Disentangled Representation for Clinical Multi-Modal Fusion with Missing Modality and Modal Inconsistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06197/) (2024)
- [AdaCare: Explainable Clinical Health Status Representation Learning via Scale-Adaptive Feature Extraction and Recalibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12205/) (2019)
- [Prototypical Information Bottlenecking and Disentangling for Multimodal Cancer Survival Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01646/) (2024)
- [Using Clinical Notes with Time Series Data for ICU Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09702/) (2019)
- [Combining 3D Image and Tabular Data via the Dynamic Affine Feature Map Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05990/) (2021)
- [Deep learning for temporal data representation in electronic health records: A systematic review of challenges and methodologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09951/) (2021)
- [Improving Medical Predictions by Irregular Multimodal Electronic Health Records Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12156/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Gaussian Mixture based Deep Generative Model For Robust Forecasting on Sparse Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02164/) (2021)
- [SCOUTER: Slot Attention-based Classifier for Explainable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06138/) (2020)
- [PTaRL: Prototype-based Tabular Representation Learning via Space Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05364/) (2024)
- [Graph-Text Multi-Modal Pre-training for Medical Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09994/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [PULSE-ICU: A Pretrained Unified Long-Sequence Encoder for Multi-task Prediction in Intensive Care Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22199/) (2025)
- [Deep TPC: Temporal-Prior Conditioning for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16188/) (2026)
- [A Clinical Point Cloud Paradigm for In-Hospital Mortality Prediction from Multi-Level Incomplete Multimodal EHRs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04614/) (2026)
- [LLM4EHR: Aligning Clinical Time Series with Medical Event Sequences via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15447/) (2026)
- [Removing Temporal Note Redundancy Improves Multimodal Reinforcement Learning for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14157/) (2026)
- [Multimodal Prompt Learning with Irregular EHRs for Robust Monitoring of Critical Care Patients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21941/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Integrating multimodal Electronic Health Records (EHR) data, such as numerical time series and free-text clinical reports, has great potential in predicting clinical outcomes. However, prior work has primarily focused on capturing temporal interactions within individual samples and fusing multimodal information, overlooking critical temporal patterns across patients. These patterns, such as trends in vital signs like abnormal heart rate or blood pressure, can indicate deteriorating health or an impending critical event. Similarly, clinical notes often contain textual descriptions that reflect these patterns. Identifying corresponding temporal patterns across different modalities is crucial for improving the accuracy of clinical outcome predictions, yet it remains a challenging task. To address this gap, we introduce a Cross-Modal Temporal Pattern Discovery (CTPD) framework, designed to efficiently extract meaningful cross-modal temporal patterns from multimodal EHR data. Our approach introduces shared initial temporal pattern representations which are refined using slot attention to generate temporal semantic embeddings. To ensure rich cross-modal temporal semantics in the learned patterns, we introduce a contrastive-based TPNCE loss for cross-modal alignment, along with two reconstruction losses to retain core information of each modality. Evaluations on two clinically critical tasks, 48-hour in-hospital mortality and 24-hour phenotype classification, using the MIMIC-III database demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing approaches.
