MoE-Health: A Mixture of Experts Framework for Robust Multimodal Healthcare Prediction

Computer Vision & MultiModal AI
Published: arXiv: 2508.21793v1
Authors

Xiaoyang Wang Christopher C. Yang

Abstract

Healthcare systems generate diverse multimodal data, including Electronic Health Records (EHR), clinical notes, and medical images. Effectively leveraging this data for clinical prediction is challenging, particularly as real-world samples often present with varied or incomplete modalities. Existing approaches typically require complete modality data or rely on manual selection strategies, limiting their applicability in real-world clinical settings where data availability varies across patients and institutions. To address these limitations, we propose MoE-Health, a novel Mixture of Experts framework designed for robust multimodal fusion in healthcare prediction. MoE-Health architecture is specifically developed to handle samples with differing modalities and improve performance on critical clinical tasks. By leveraging specialized expert networks and a dynamic gating mechanism, our approach dynamically selects and combines relevant experts based on available data modalities, enabling flexible adaptation to varying data availability scenarios. We evaluate MoE-Health on the MIMIC-IV dataset across three critical clinical prediction tasks: in-hospital mortality prediction, long length of stay, and hospital readmission prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that MoE-Health achieves superior performance compared to existing multimodal fusion methods while maintaining robustness across different modality availability patterns. The framework effectively integrates multimodal information, offering improved predictive performance and robustness in handling heterogeneous and incomplete healthcare data, making it particularly suitable for deployment in diverse healthcare environments with heterogeneous data availability.

Paper Summary

Problem
Healthcare systems generate vast amounts of diverse data, including electronic health records, clinical notes, and medical images. However, existing approaches to predicting clinical outcomes from this data are limited by their requirement for complete modality data or manual selection strategies. This can lead to poor performance in real-world clinical settings where data availability varies across patients and institutions.
Key Innovation
The researchers propose MoE-Health, a novel Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework specifically designed for robust multimodal healthcare prediction. MoE-Health leverages specialized expert networks and a dynamic gating mechanism to dynamically select and combine relevant experts based on available data modalities. This allows the framework to effectively handle samples with differing sets of available modalities and learn tailored fusion strategies.
Practical Impact
MoE-Health has the potential to improve clinical decision-making by providing a more accurate and robust way to predict patient outcomes from incomplete and heterogeneous data. This could lead to better patient care, reduced healthcare costs, and improved resource allocation. The framework's ability to adapt to varying data availability makes it particularly suitable for deployment in diverse healthcare environments.
Analogy / Intuitive Explanation
Imagine trying to predict the weather based on different types of weather data, such as temperature, humidity, and wind speed. Existing approaches would require complete data for all three types, but MoE-Health is like a smart weather forecaster that can use any combination of data types to make a prediction. It can even learn to represent missing data in a way that helps it make a more accurate prediction. This makes it a more flexible and robust tool for predicting complex outcomes like patient health.
Paper Information
Categories:
cs.LG cs.AI
Published Date:

arXiv ID:

2508.21793v1

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