arXiv Computation and Language

Continued Pretraining of FinBERT on Finnish Histopathological Reports: Train-Time Signals and Proxy Downstream Correlations

The paper investigates continued pretraining (CPT) of the Finnish BERT model (FinBERT) on a Finnish histopathological dataset, noting that CPT train‑time loss curves vary significantly across domains. Since the histopathology data lacks labels, the authors use public Finnish datasets as proxy data to examine whether CPT‑derived signals correlate with downstream classification gains. Their exploratory analysis finds that certain CPT features are associated with improved proxy classification performance, adding to the sparse literature on Finnish healthcare NLP.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

Making Clinical Language Models Auditable: Concept-Guided Fine-Tuning for Robust Prediction

The paper introduces CAST, a concept-guided artifact suppression tuning framework that uses sparse autoencoders to identify and suppress note-specific artifacts in clinical language models. CAST labels latent features with an LLM-assisted pipeline and ICD‑10 constraints, then fine‑tunes the model while providing post‑hoc per‑concept attributions for auditability. In experiments on MIMIC‑IV discharge‑note mortality prediction, CAST outperforms standard fine‑tuned encoders and competes with strong LLM baselines while offering a feature‑level audit trail of clinical concepts and suppressed artifacts.

By Jin Mu, Guanhua Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Where Does the Signal Live? A Web Data Recipe for Medical Encoder Pretraining

The paper introduces a web‑data curation recipe for pretraining medical encoders, addressing the scarcity of large, diverse corpora in dense‑terminology domains like medicine. It proposes two complementary techniques: medical‑term density filtering to select documents rich in medical terminology, and signal‑amplifying rephrasing that uses an LLM to rewrite documents into denser variants with broader entity contexts. Applied to French medical NLP, the recipe produces the FineMed corpus and the DoctoBERT encoder family, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on the DrBenchmark public benchmark and a proprietary clinical NER task.

By Bofeng Huang, Jacques Sun, Diane Bouchacourt, Nicolas Barascud, Fajwel Fogel
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 20

LLM4EHR: Aligning Clinical Time Series with Medical Event Sequences via Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 15447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent research in clinical machine learning, focusing on outcome predictions in intensive care unit (ICU), has shifted from bespoke supervised models to foundation models, utilising modern representation learning methods.

By Jingteng Li, Alexander Capstick, Louise Rigny, Iona Biggart, Neil J Sebire, Payam Barnaghi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Automatic identification of diagnosis from hospital discharge letters via weakly supervised Natural Language Processing

arXiv:2410. 15051v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Identifying patient diagnoses from hospital discharge letters is essential for large-scale cohort selection and epidemiological research, but traditional supervised approaches require extensive manual annotation, which is often impractical for large textual datasets.

By Vittorio Torri, Elisa Barbieri, Anna Cantarutti, Carlo Giaquinto, Francesca Ieva
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 8

One Loss to Rule Them All: Marked Time-to-Event for Structured EHR Foundation Models

arXiv:2602. 00541v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Clinical events captured in Electronic Health Records (EHR) are irregularly sampled and may consist of a mixture of discrete events and numerical measurements, such as laboratory values or treatment dosages.

By Zilin Jing, Vincent Jeanselme, Yuta Kobayashi, Simon A. Lee, Chao Pang, Aparajita Kashyap, Yanwei Li, Xinzhuo Jiang, Shalmali Joshi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 24

PORTER: Language-Grounded Event Representations for Portable Structured EHR Foundation Models

arXiv:2606. 24102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most electronic health record (EHR) foundation models encode clinical events as discrete event tokens from a fixed vocabulary and therefore cannot directly represent events containing unseen concepts or new combinations of concepts and attributes such as numeric values.

By Lin Lawrence Guo, Adam Paul Yan, Emily Vettese, Lillian Sung
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

An end-to-end-trained vision-language model for native-language prostate pathology report generation

An end-to-end-trained vision-language model generates prostate biopsy reports in native languages, demonstrated in German. The system uses a tokenizer and model trained from scratch and an automated pipeline that splits composite reports into image-text pairs, producing 17,344 pairs from 2,402 cases without manual annotation. Evaluated on clinical attributes, it achieves 96.2% F1 for malignancy detection and 65.2% for Gleason grading, comparable to an FDA-cleared classifier and validated on external cohorts.

By Christian Grashei, Fabian G\"ulhan, Maximilian Legnar, Fabian St\"ogbauer, Cleo-Aron Weis, Carolin Mogler, Peter Sch\"uffler
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Cross-Lingual Parkinson's Disease Severity Assessment Using Pre-trained Speech Embeddings: A Multi-Class Evaluation

The paper evaluates pre‑trained speech embeddings from four state‑of‑the‑art speech foundation models for cross‑lingual Parkinson's disease severity assessment. Experiments span three datasets in zero‑shot and k‑shot settings, showing that these embeddings can transfer meaningfully across languages, though performance varies with dataset characteristics, preprocessing, and adaptation strategy. Misclassifications linked to inter‑speaker variability and atypical speech patterns underscore the need for more robust feature extraction, modeling, and explainability to support reliable clinical insights.

By Simon Pals, Cristian Tejedor-Garcia