Paper Detail

NOAH: Learning the Full Patient Journey. A Longitudinal Multimodal Time-Aware Model for Representation and Forecasting

Tobias Susetzky, Raphael Rehms, Dmitrii Seletkov, Özgün Turgut, Michelle Espranita Liman, Lisa Steinhelfer, Rickmer Braren, Daniel Rueckert

arxiv Score 7.2

Published 2026-09-08 · First seen 2026-09-09

General AI

Abstract

The digitization of healthcare has generated vast, longitudinal, and multimodal patient records over a lifetime, yet fully exploiting these data to represent and predict patient state trajectories remains a critical challenge. Current AI models often struggle to capture the complex, irregular temporal dynamics and inherent stochasticity of real-world multimodal patient data. Existing AI approaches for modeling longitudinal patient records are predominantly discriminative, limited to a few modalities, constrained by closed categorical vocabularies, treating time as a monotonic inductive bias, or they are limited in forecasting future patient states. We introduce NOAH, a time-aware, task-agnostic, generative transformer model representing and forecasting the full multimodal patient journey. NOAH features a novel bidirectional time integration and a variational latent space to capture the continuous evolution of patient states and the stochasticity of clinical trajectories. Built from over 559 million clinical events from 431,000 hospital visits of 299,000 patients across the MIMIC dataset family, NOAH natively processes medical images, time-series and numeric signals, categorical events, as well as structured and unstructured clinical records. NOAH is the first truly holistic generative model in its field, enabling autoregressive forecasting with optional time control, zero-shot classification, and counterfactual intervention simulation. It generates highly informative and predictive patient state representations that demonstrate strong performance in probing for clinical outcomes, 15 ICD chapters, and 29 comorbidities, as well as in time-to-event prediction. Seamlessly handling diverse modalities and complex temporal dynamics, NOAH provides a versatile, task-agnostic, scalable foundation for intelligent predictive systems in personalized clinical care and digital medicine.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
soon
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{susetzky2026noah,
  title = {NOAH: Learning the Full Patient Journey. A Longitudinal Multimodal Time-Aware Model for Representation and Forecasting},
  author = {Tobias Susetzky and Raphael Rehms and Dmitrii Seletkov and Özgün Turgut and Michelle Espranita Liman and Lisa Steinhelfer and Rickmer Braren and Daniel Rueckert},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {The digitization of healthcare has generated vast, longitudinal, and multimodal patient records over a lifetime, yet fully exploiting these data to represent and predict patient state trajectories remains a critical challenge. Current AI models often struggle to capture the complex, irregular temporal dynamics and inherent stochasticity of real-world multimodal patient data. Existing AI approaches for modeling longitudinal patient records are predominantly discriminative, limited to a few modali},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09140},
  keywords = {cs.LG, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2609.09140},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}