Structured Visual Evidence Decomposition for Evidence-Grounded Multimodal Screening of Obstructive Sleep Apnea-Hypopnea Syndrome

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Original abstract

Effective pre-polysomnography screening for obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS) requires combining clinical risk factors with visible craniofacial and neck cues. Directly prompting general-purpose multimodal foundation models for medical yes/no decisions can yield unstable, poorly calibrated outputs. We propose EviOSAHS, an evidence-grounded multimodal reasoning framework that separates image-only anatomical evidence acquisition from final clinical adjudication. Each frontal facial image is decomposed into seven fixed anatomical queries covering the neck, chin, mouth, face/neck fat, lower jaw, midface, and nose. Visual responses are converted into structured evidence cards recording target anatomy, visibility, risk direction, evidence strength, confidence, and a concise summary. These cards are combined with a cleaned clinical profile only in the final stage, where a large language model performs balanced binary screening adjudication. We evaluated EviOSAHS on a 642-subject cohort, mapping normal subjects to screening-negative and mild, moderate, or severe OSAHS subjects to screening-positive. EviOSAHS achieved 88.47% accuracy, 94.86% sensitivity, 93.74% F1-score, and a 5.14% false-negative rate, outperforming clinical-only prompting, direct multimodal prompting, and naive two-stage pipelines under a unified protocol. Ablations showed that seven-question visual decomposition and balanced final adjudication were critical to the high-sensitivity operating point. A question-level audit of 4,494 visual outputs showed a 100% structured parse rate and 93.88% high-visibility rate. EviOSAHS provides an auditable, high-sensitivity workflow for binary pre-polysomnography OSAHS screening, but should be viewed as a triage assistant rather than a diagnostic system. Prospective validation, external testing, and calibrated operating-point control are needed before clinical deployment.

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• Official / arXiv page
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