When Does Multimodal Learning Help in Healthcare? A Benchmark on EHR and Chest X-Ray Fusion

Researchers conducted a systematic benchmark study on multimodal fusion between Electronic Health Records (EHR) and chest X-rays for clinical decision support, revealing when and how combining data modalities improves healthcare AI performance. The study found that multimodal fusion helps when data is complete but benefits degrade under realistic missing data scenarios, and released an open-source benchmarking toolkit for reproducible evaluation.