Multi-modal Disease Prediction with Hierarchical Self-supervised Learning

The proliferation of healthcare data sources, including diverse imaging modalities and biochemical measurements, has created unprecedented opportunities for comprehensive disease prediction. Multi-modal clinical data, encompassing medical imaging reports, biochemical assays, and longitudinal clinical records, provides a rich foundation for developing sophisticated diagnostic models. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a leading methodological framework, distinguished by their capacity to model complex inter-patient relationships and capture community structures within patient data. Despite their promise, current GNN-based approaches exhibit limitations in handling noisy, low-quality data and often impose overly restrictive graph smoothness constraints. These limitations can obscure patient-specific variations and compromise model robustness. To overcome these challenges, we propose HierSSL (Hierarchical Self-Supervised Learning), a novel multi-modal disease prediction framework that enhances representational learning through dual-scale self-supervision mechanisms operating at both local and global levels. HierSSL's architecture specifically addresses two critical aspects: 1) the capture of local inter-modality dependencies and global community patterns, and 2) the optimization of multi-modal feature integration through an innovative combination of feature consistency constraints and graph contrastive learning. Empirical evaluation across two distinct disease prediction datasets demonstrates that HierSSL achieves statistically significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its efficacy in robust multi-modal data integration for disease prediction tasks.