Publication
Goal: In patients with coronary artery disease, the prediction of future cardiac events such as myocardial infarction (MI) remains a major challenge. In this work, we propose a novel anatomy-informed multimodal deep learning framework to predict future MI from clinical data and Invasive Coronary Angiography (ICA) images. Methods: The images are analyzed by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) guided by anatomical information, and the clinical data by an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Embeddings from both sources are then merged to provide a patient-level prediction. Results: The results of our framework on a clinical study of 445 patients admitted with acute coronary syndromes confirms that multimodal learning increases the predictive power and achieves good performance (AUC: 0.67 ± 0.04 & F1-Score: 0.36 ± 0.12), which outperforms the prediction obtained by each modality independently as well as that of interventional cardiologists (AUC: 0.54 & F1-Score: 0.18). Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt towards combining multimodal data through a deep learning framework for future MI prediction. Although it demonstrates the superiority of multi-modal approaches over single modality, the results do not yet meet the necessary criteria for practical application.