Discrepancy-Aware Contrastive Adaptation in Medical Time Series Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel discrepancy-aware contrastive learning framework for medical time series analysis, effectively leveraging external data and adaptive contrastive strategies to improve disease diagnosis accuracy across multiple datasets.

Contribution

It proposes LMCF, a learnable multi-views contrastive framework that adaptively captures disease-specific features and integrates discrepancy reconstruction for enhanced medical diagnosis.

Findings

Outperforms seven baseline methods on three datasets

Improves diagnosis accuracy for myocardial infarction, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's

Demonstrates robustness and generalizability across different medical conditions

Abstract

In medical time series disease diagnosis, two key challenges are identified. First, the high annotation cost of medical data leads to overfitting in models trained on label-limited, single-center datasets. To address this, we propose incorporating external data from related tasks and leveraging AE-GAN to extract prior knowledge, providing valuable references for downstream tasks. Second, many existing studies employ contrastive learning to derive more generalized medical sequence representations for diagnostic tasks, usually relying on manually designed diverse positive and negative sample pairs. However, these approaches are complex, lack generalizability, and fail to adaptively capture disease-specific features across different conditions. To overcome this, we introduce LMCF (Learnable Multi-views Contrastive Framework), a framework that integrates a multi-head attention mechanism and adaptively learns representations from different views through inter-view and intra-view contrastive learning strategies. Additionally, the pre-trained AE-GAN is used to reconstruct discrepancies in the target data as disease probabilities, which are then integrated into the contrastive learning process. Experiments on three target datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms other seven baselines, highlighting its significant impact on healthcare applications such as the diagnosis of myocardial infarction, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease. We release the source code at xxxxx.