Integrating Heterogeneous Echocardiography AI Outputs in Language Space: Learnable Late Fusion with a Supervised LLM
View- and target-specific echocardiography AI models capture useful but complementary information and may not achieve sufficient predictive performance in isolation. A learned ensemble is a natural way to combine these outputs, but heterogeneous models typically require each output to be converted into a binary decision, probability, confidence score, or fixed-length feature vector. We developed a supervised large language model (LLM)-based late-fusion module that directly aggregates view-specific predicted finding statements and predicted measurements in language space and learns a case-level fusion function. In patient-level three-fold cross-validation of 859 examinations from 646 patients, the proposed method integrated heterogeneous outputs within a single framework, performed comparably to the best-performing reference strategy evaluated, and outperformed a general-purpose LLM without task-specific training. These results suggest that a supervised LLM can combine multiple upstream models without model-specific output conversion or feature engineering that requires medical knowledge.
Authors
- Shun Kitamura (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8480-8557)
- Ryo Matsuoka (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2317-5845)
- Satoshi Kodera (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2908-6875)
- Chiemi Yamazaki
- Ryo Takizawa (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-7846-8269)
- Tempei Kabayama (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-4733-1416)
- Norihiko Takeda
- Yuta Ando
Publication Details
- Journal
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Published
- 2026-10-29
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.39464
- Primary Topic
- Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
- Type
- preprint