Leveraging MIMIC Datasets for Better Digital Health: A Review on Open Problems, Progress Highlights, and Future Promises

The Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) datasets have become the Kernel of Digital Health Research by providing freely accessible, deidentified records from tens of thousands of critical care admissions, enabling a broad spectrum of applications in clinical decision support, outcome prediction, and healthcare analytics. Although numerous studies and surveys have explored the predictive power and clinical utility of MIMIC based models, critical challenges in data integration, representation, and interoperability remain underexplored. This paper presents a comprehensive survey that focuses uniquely on open problems. We identify persistent issues such as data granularity, cardinality limitations, heterogeneous coding schemes, and ethical constraints that hinder the generalizability and real-time implementation of machine learning models. We highlight key progress in dimensionality reduction, temporal modelling, causal inference, and privacy preserving analytics, while also outlining promising directions including hybrid modelling, federated learning, and standardized preprocessing pipelines. By critically examining these structural limitations and their implications, this survey offers actionable insights to guide the next generation of MIMIC powered digital health innovations.

BCN: Batch Channel Normalization for Image Classification

Normalization techniques have been widely used in the field of deep learning due to their capability of enabling higher learning rates and are less careful in initialization. However, the effectiveness of popular normalization technologies is typically limited to specific areas. Unlike the standard Batch Normalization (BN) and Layer Normalization (LN), where BN computes the mean and variance along the (N,H,W) dimensions and LN computes the mean and variance along the (C,H,W) dimensions (N, C, H and W are the batch, channel, spatial height and width dimension, respectively), this paper presents a novel normalization technique called Batch Channel Normalization (BCN). To exploit both the channel and batch dependence and adaptively and combine the advantages of BN and LN based on specific datasets or tasks, BCN separately normalizes inputs along the (N, H, W) and (C, H, W) axes, then combines the normalized outputs based on adaptive parameters. As a basic block, BCN can be easily integrated into existing models for various applications in the field of computer vision. Empirical results show that the proposed technique can be seamlessly applied to various versions of CNN or Vision Transformer architecture. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/AfifaKhaled/BatchChannel-Normalization

Two Independent Teachers are Better Role Model

Recent deep learning models have attracted substantial attention in infant brain analysis. These models have performed state-of-the-art performance, such as semi-supervised techniques (e.g., Temporal Ensembling, mean teacher). However, these models depend on an encoder-decoder structure with stacked local operators to gather long-range information, and the local operators limit the efficiency and effectiveness. Besides, the $MRI$ data contain different tissue properties ($TPs$) such as $T1$ and $T2$. One major limitation of these models is that they use both data as inputs to the segment process, i.e., the models are trained on the dataset once, and it requires much computational and memory requirements during inference. In this work, we address the above limitations by designing a new deep-learning model, called 3D-DenseUNet, which works as adaptable global aggregation blocks in down-sampling to solve the issue of spatial information loss. The self-attention module connects the down-sampling blocks to up-sampling blocks, and integrates the feature maps in three dimensions of spatial and channel, effectively improving the representation potential and discriminating ability of the model. Additionally, we propose a new method called Two Independent Teachers ($2IT$), that summarizes the model weights instead of label predictions. Each teacher model is trained on different types of brain data, $T1$ and $T2$, respectively. Then, a fuse model is added to improve test accuracy and enable training with fewer parameters and labels compared to the Temporal Ensembling method without modifying the network architecture. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.