PSA-1DCNN: Multimodal Biomarker and Text Integration for Lung Cancer Diagnosis.

Abstract

Integrating multimodal data, such as unstructured clinical narratives and quantitative blood biomarkers, remains a major challenge in modern healthcare due to heterogeneous formats, complex semantics, and limited inter-modal correlations. Despite significant advances in deep learning, effective fusion of clinical text and biomarkers is still unresolved, restricting the full potential of precision medicine. We propose PSA-1DCNN, a novel Parallel Self-Attention 1D Convolutional Neural Network designed for multimodal integration in lung cancer detection. By combining self-attention mechanisms with 1D convolutional layers, PSA-1DCNN captures global semantic relationships from clinical text while learning local discriminative patterns from biomarker data. We further investigate four fusion strategies to optimize cross-modal information integration. Experiments conducted on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV demonstrate that PSA-1DCNN outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including ClinicalBERT, LSTM, and 1D-CNN. Our best-performing configuration achieves an F1-score of 98.4% on MIMIC-IV, with strong cross-version generalization to MIMIC-III. SHAP-based interpretability further highlights the clinical relevance of key biomarkers such as WBC and RBC, alongside critical textual features. This study presents a scalable and interpretable framework that bridges heterogeneous modalities, advancing precision oncology and offering promising opportunities for personalized diagnostics.