# Prognostic Value of Lung Ultrasound Biomarkers for Readmission Risk in Congestive Heart Failure: A Pilot Data-Driven Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18878 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18878/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 10 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Cross-site Learning with Redesigned Net for COVID-19 CT Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07652/) (2020)
- [Learning Generic Lung Ultrasound Biomarkers for Decoupling Feature Extraction from Downstream Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08398/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Better Severity Scoring of Lung Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07357/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hospital readmission within 30 days of discharge is a leading driver of morbidity, mortality, and avoidable healthcare expenditure in congestive heart failure (CHF). Current clinical risk stratification tools rely primarily on non-imaging data and exhibit limited predictive performance. Point-of-care lung ultrasound (LUS) offers a sensitive, noninvasive window into the pulmonary congestion that characterizes CHF decompensation, yet its prognostic utility for readmission prediction remains largely unexplored. We present a pilot feasibility study, the first systematic machine learning study using B-mode LUS acquired during hospitalization to predict 30-day CHF readmission. Quantitative spatiotemporal embeddings are extracted from a pretrained Temporal Shift Module (TSM) ResNet-18 encoder, and interpretable biomarker features are separately evaluated. Through structured ablations over lung view, temporal representation, multi-view fusion, and cross-lung augmentation, we identify the key imaging factors driving readmission risk. Our findings reveal that (1) dependent lower-lung regions (Left-3, Right-3) carry the strongest prognostic signal, consistent with their greater susceptibility to hydrostatic congestion; (2) temporal difference features between sequential examinations substantially outperform single-timepoint representations, highlighting the importance of capturing disease trajectory; and (3) multi-view feature concatenation yields the best overall performance, with our top MLP model achieving an F1 score of 0.80 (95% CI: 0.62-0.96). Biomarker analysis further reveals that pleural-line abnormalities, including breaks and indentations, are as informative as the canonical A-line and B-line markers. These results support POCUS-derived biomarkers as practical, interpretable tools for noninvasive CHF risk stratification.