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Abstract:Preterm birth (PTB) prediction can enable targeted surveillance and timely intervention, yet most ultrasound-based models use a single selected transvaginal ultrasound (TVUS) frame per patient despite routine exams acquiring multiple cervical images. We formulate PTB prediction as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem, representing each patient as a variable-sized bag of TVUS images with a single outcome label. To move beyond standard MIL aggregators that collapse a bag into a point estimate, we propose a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) pooling, which summarizes all images in a bag into a fixed-length representation by modeling their feature distribution. This design captures intra-patient variability. We evaluate the method on a private clinical cohort and on a public lymph node metastasis benchmark. For PTB prediction, GMM pooling improves over the instance-based model PR-AUC from 0.44 to 0.56. On the lymph node benchmark, it achieves state-of-the-art performance with 0.91 F1-score and 0.89 ROC-AUC for classification and 0.18 MAE for regression. The code is publicly available at this https URL.

Submission history

From: Hussain Alasmawi [view email]
[v1] Mon, 22 Jun 2026 08:18:08 UTC (14,472 KB)