A Latent ODE Approach to Spatiotemporal Modeling of Cine Cardiac MRI

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) captures rich spatiotemporal information about ventricular structure and motion, but conventional risk models use only a few image-derived indices from selected cardiac phases. We present a latent dynamical model that encodes bi-ventricular anatomy and full-cycle cine motion as a continuous latent trajectory, using heart-rate-aware neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) dynamics and a graph-based mesh autoencoder to reconstruct anatomically consistent 3D+t ventricular motion. A covariate-conditioned prior defines the expected end-diastolic latent state, and a Cox proportional hazards model tests whether deviations from this prior predict incident heart failure. We studied 72,386 UK Biobank participants without baseline cardiovascular disease, including 367 incident heart failure events. In a held-out evaluation subset, adding the latent score to refitted pooled cohort equations improved the stratified C-index from 0.704 to 0.785, compared with 0.764 for seven established cardiac markers. Compared with non-graph and non-ODE approaches, the proposed model gave the best trade-off between reconstruction fidelity, generative realism, and downstream prognostic performance. These results suggest that continuous full-cycle modeling of ventricular motion provides informative cardiac phenotypes beyond conventional CMR summaries, while external validation in more representative patient cohorts is required before clinical risk-prediction use.

A Self-Supervised Model for Multi-modal Stroke Risk Prediction

Predicting stroke risk is a complex challenge that can be enhanced by integrating diverse clinically available data modalities. This study introduces a self-supervised multimodal framework that combines 3D brain imaging, clinical data, and image-derived features to improve stroke risk prediction prior to onset. By leveraging large unannotated clinical datasets, the framework captures complementary and synergistic information across image and tabular data modalities. Our approach is based on a contrastive learning framework that couples contrastive language-image pretraining with an image-tabular matching module, to better align multimodal data representations in a shared latent space. The model is trained on the UK Biobank, which includes structural brain MRI and clinical data. We benchmark its performance against state-of-the-art unimodal and multimodal methods using tabular, image, and image-tabular combinations under diverse frozen and trainable model settings. The proposed model outperformed self-supervised tabular (image) methods by 2.6% (2.6%) in ROC-AUC and by 3.3% (5.6%) in balanced accuracy. Additionally, it showed a 7.6% increase in balanced accuracy compared to the best multimodal supervised model. Through interpretable tools, our approach demonstrated better integration of tabular and image data, providing richer and more aligned embeddings. Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping heatmaps further revealed activated brain regions commonly associated in the literature with brain aging, stroke risk, and clinical outcomes. This robust self-supervised multimodal framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods for stroke risk prediction and offers a strong foundation for future studies integrating diverse data modalities to advance clinical predictive modelling.