Unity in Diversity: Collaborative Pre-training Across Multimodal Medical Sources

Although pre-training has become a prevalent approach for addressing various biomedical tasks, the current efficacy of pre-trained models is hindered by their reliance on a limited scope of medical sources. This limitation results in data scarcity during pre-training and restricts the range of applicable downstream tasks. In response to these challenges, we develop Medical Cross-Source Pre-training (MEDCSP), a new pre-training strategy designed to bridge the gap between multimodal medical sources. MEDCSP employs modality-level aggregation to unify patient data within individual sources. Additionally, leveraging temporal information and diagnosis history, MEDCSP effectively captures explicit and implicit correlations between patients across different sources. To evaluate the proposed strategy, we conduct comprehensive experiments, where the experiments are based on 6 modalities from 2 real-world medical data sources, and MEDCSP is evaluated on 4 tasks against 19 baselines, marking an initial yet essential step towards cross-source modeling in the medical domain.