Clinical Multi-modal Fusion with Heterogeneous Graph and Disease Correlation Learning for Multi-Disease Prediction

Multi-disease diagnosis using multi-modal data like electronic health records and medical imaging is a critical clinical task. Although existing deep learning methods have achieved initial success in this area, a significant gap persists for their real-world application. This gap arises because they often overlook unavoidable practical challenges, such as modality missingness, noise, temporal asynchrony, and evidentiary inconsistency across modalities for different diseases. To overcome these limitations, we propose HGDC-Fuse, a novel framework that constructs a patient-centric multi-modal heterogeneous graph to robustly integrate asynchronous and incomplete multi-modal data. Moreover, we design a heterogeneous graph learning module to aggregate multi-source information, featuring a disease correlation-guided attention layer that resolves the modal inconsistency issue by learning disease-specific modality weights based on disease correlations. On the large-scale MIMIC-IV and MIMIC-CXR datasets, HGDC-Fuse significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.