DAFTED: Decoupled Asymmetric Fusion of Tabular and Echocardiographic Data for Cardiac Hypertension Diagnosis

Multimodal data fusion has emerged as a key approach in recent years for enhancing diagnosis and prognosis in many medical applications. With the advent of transformer-based methods, it is now possible to combine information from different modalities that provide complementary insights. However, most existing methods rely on symmetric fusion schemes, assuming equal importance for information carried by each modality—a strong assumption that may not always hold true. In this study, we propose an alternative fusion strategy based on an asymmetric scheme. Starting with a primary modality that offers the most critical information, we integrate secondary modality contributions by disentangling shared and modality-specific information. The proposed model was validated on a dataset of 239 patients for characterizing hypertension severity by fusing time series automatically extracted from echocardiographic image sequences and tabular data from patient records. Results show that our approach outperforms existing unimodal and multimodal approaches, achieving an AUC score over 90% - a crucial benchmark for clinical use.