Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which contain patients' medical histories in various multi-modal formats, often overlook the potential for joint reasoning across imaging and table modalities underexplored in current EHR Question Answering (QA) systems. In this paper, we introduce EHRXQA, a novel multi-modal question answering dataset combining structured EHRs and chest X-ray images. To develop our dataset, we first construct two uni-modal resources: 1) The MIMIC-CXR-VQA dataset, our newly created medical visual question answering (VQA) benchmark, specifically designed to augment the imaging modality in EHR QA, and 2) EHRSQL (MIMIC-IV), a refashioned version of a previously established table-based EHR QA dataset. By integrating these two uni-modal resources, we successfully construct a multi-modal EHR QA dataset that necessitates both uni-modal and cross-modal reasoning. To address the unique challenges of multi-modal questions within EHRs, we propose a NeuralSQL-based strategy equipped with an external VQA API. This pioneering endeavor enhances engagement with multi-modal EHR sources and we believe that our dataset can catalyze advances in real-world medical scenarios such as clinical decision-making and research. EHRXQA is available at https://github.com/baeseongsu/ehrxqa.

This paper proposes a practical approach for automatic sleep stage classification based on a multi-level feature learning framework and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) classifier using heart rate and wrist actigraphy derived from a wearable device. The feature learning framework is designed to extract low- and mid-level features. Low-level features capture temporal and frequency domain properties and mid-level features learn compositions and structural information of signals. Since sleep staging is a sequential problem with long-term dependencies, we take advantage of RNNs with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) architectures for sequence data learning. To simulate the actual situation of daily sleep, experiments are conducted with a resting group in which sleep is recorded in resting state, and a comprehensive group in which both resting sleep and non-resting sleep are included.We evaluate the algorithm based on an eight-fold cross validation to classify five sleep stages (W, N1, N2, N3, and REM). The proposed algorithm achieves weighted precision, recall and F1 score of 58.0%, 60.3%, and 58.2% in the resting group and 58.5%, 61.1%, and 58.5% in the comprehensive group, respectively. Various comparison experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of feature learning and BLSTM. We further explore the influence of depth and width of RNNs on performance. Our method is specially proposed for wearable devices and is expected to be applicable for long-term sleep monitoring at home. Without using too much prior domain knowledge, our method has the potential to generalize sleep disorder detection.