Is Clinical Text Enough? A Multimodal Study on Mortality Prediction in Heart Failure Patients

Oumaima El Khettari, Virgile Barthet, Guillaume Hocquet, Joconde Weller, Emmanuel Morin, Pierre Zweigenbaum


Abstract
Accurate short-term mortality prediction in heart failure (HF) remains challenging, particularly when relying on structured electronic health record (EHR) data alone. We evaluate transformer-based models on a French HF cohort, comparing text-only, structured-only, multimodal, and LLM-based approaches. Our results show that enriching clinical text with entity-level representations improves prediction over CLS embeddings alone, and that supervised multimodal fusion of text and structured variables achieves the best overall performance. In contrast, large language models perform inconsistently across modalities and decoding strategies, with text-only prompts outperforming structured or multimodal inputs. These findings highlight that entity-aware multimodal transformers offer the most reliable solution for short-term HF outcome prediction, while current LLM prompting remains limited for clinical decision support.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
194–206
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-014
DOI:
10.63317/47hsfchk79n6
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Oumaima El Khettari, Virgile Barthet, Guillaume Hocquet, Joconde Weller, Emmanuel Morin, and Pierre Zweigenbaum. 2026. Is Clinical Text Enough? A Multimodal Study on Mortality Prediction in Heart Failure Patients. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 194–206, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Is Clinical Text Enough? A Multimodal Study on Mortality Prediction in Heart Failure Patients (El Khettari et al., LREC 2026)
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