TRACE: Transformer-Based Risk Assessment for Clinical Evaluation

We present TRACE (Transformer-based Risk Assessment for Clinical Evaluation), a novel method for clinical risk assessment based on clinical data, leveraging the self-attention mechanism for enhanced feature interaction and result interpretation. Our approach is able to handle different data modaliti...

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Main Authors: Dionysis Christopoulos, Sotiris Spanos, Valsamis Ntouskos, Konstantinos Karantzalos
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2025-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11028068/
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author Dionysis Christopoulos
Sotiris Spanos
Valsamis Ntouskos
Konstantinos Karantzalos
author_facet Dionysis Christopoulos
Sotiris Spanos
Valsamis Ntouskos
Konstantinos Karantzalos
author_sort Dionysis Christopoulos
collection DOAJ
description We present TRACE (Transformer-based Risk Assessment for Clinical Evaluation), a novel method for clinical risk assessment based on clinical data, leveraging the self-attention mechanism for enhanced feature interaction and result interpretation. Our approach is able to handle different data modalities, including continuous, categorical and multiple-choice (checkbox) attributes. The proposed architecture features a shared representation of the clinical data obtained by integrating specialized embeddings of each data modality, enabling the detection of high-risk individuals using Transformer encoder layers. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed method, a strong baseline based on non-negative multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) is introduced. The proposed method outperforms various baselines widely used in the domain of clinical risk assessment, while effectively handling missing values. In terms of explainability, our Transformer-based method offers easily interpretable results via attention weights, further enhancing the clinicians’ decision-making process.
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issn 2169-3536
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spelling doaj-art-87e0878f5db744d0838b4bb23a0b31492025-08-20T02:07:19ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362025-01-011310172110173410.1109/ACCESS.2025.357797311028068TRACE: Transformer-Based Risk Assessment for Clinical EvaluationDionysis Christopoulos0https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5386-7902Sotiris Spanos1https://orcid.org/0009-0000-1436-1876Valsamis Ntouskos2https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1810-7802Konstantinos Karantzalos3https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8730-6245Remote Sensing Laboratory, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, GreeceRemote Sensing Laboratory, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, GreeceRemote Sensing Laboratory, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, GreeceRemote Sensing Laboratory, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, GreeceWe present TRACE (Transformer-based Risk Assessment for Clinical Evaluation), a novel method for clinical risk assessment based on clinical data, leveraging the self-attention mechanism for enhanced feature interaction and result interpretation. Our approach is able to handle different data modalities, including continuous, categorical and multiple-choice (checkbox) attributes. The proposed architecture features a shared representation of the clinical data obtained by integrating specialized embeddings of each data modality, enabling the detection of high-risk individuals using Transformer encoder layers. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed method, a strong baseline based on non-negative multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) is introduced. The proposed method outperforms various baselines widely used in the domain of clinical risk assessment, while effectively handling missing values. In terms of explainability, our Transformer-based method offers easily interpretable results via attention weights, further enhancing the clinicians’ decision-making process.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11028068/Self-attentiontransformer encodertabular dataclinical datamelanomaheart attack
spellingShingle Dionysis Christopoulos
Sotiris Spanos
Valsamis Ntouskos
Konstantinos Karantzalos
TRACE: Transformer-Based Risk Assessment for Clinical Evaluation
IEEE Access
Self-attention
transformer encoder
tabular data
clinical data
melanoma
heart attack
title TRACE: Transformer-Based Risk Assessment for Clinical Evaluation
title_full TRACE: Transformer-Based Risk Assessment for Clinical Evaluation
title_fullStr TRACE: Transformer-Based Risk Assessment for Clinical Evaluation
title_full_unstemmed TRACE: Transformer-Based Risk Assessment for Clinical Evaluation
title_short TRACE: Transformer-Based Risk Assessment for Clinical Evaluation
title_sort trace transformer based risk assessment for clinical evaluation
topic Self-attention
transformer encoder
tabular data
clinical data
melanoma
heart attack
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11028068/
work_keys_str_mv AT dionysischristopoulos tracetransformerbasedriskassessmentforclinicalevaluation
AT sotirisspanos tracetransformerbasedriskassessmentforclinicalevaluation
AT valsamisntouskos tracetransformerbasedriskassessmentforclinicalevaluation
AT konstantinoskarantzalos tracetransformerbasedriskassessmentforclinicalevaluation