MM-DADM: Multimodal Drug-Aware Diffusion Model for Virtual Clinical Trials
About
High failure rates in cardiac drug development necessitate virtual clinical trials via electrocardiogram (ECG) generation to reduce risks and costs. However, existing ECG generation models struggle to balance morphological realism with pathological flexibility, fail to disentangle demographics from genuine drug effects, and are severely bottlenecked by early-phase data scarcity. To overcome these hurdles, we propose the Multimodal Drug-Aware Diffusion Model (MM-DADM), the first generative framework for generating individualized drug-induced ECGs. Specifically, our proposed MM-DADM integrates a Dynamic Cross-Attention (DCA) module that adaptively fuses External Physical Knowledge (EPK) to preserve morphological realism while avoiding the suppression of complex pathological nuances. To resolve feature entanglement, a Causal Feature Encoder (CFE) actively filters out demographic noise to extract pure pharmacological representations. These representations subsequently guide a Causal-Disentangled ControlNet (CDC-Net), which leverages counterfactual data augmentation to explicitly learn intrinsic pharmacological mechanisms despite limited clinical data. Extensive experiments on $9,443$ ECGs across $8$ drug regimens demonstrate that MM-DADM outperforms $10$ state-of-the-art ECG generation models, improving simulation accuracy by at least $6.13\%$ and recall by $5.89\%$, while providing highly effective data augmentation for downstream classification tasks.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ECG Generation | ECGRDVQ and ECGDMMLD (test) | QTc Accuracy90.29 | 11 | |
| ECG Generation Fidelity Evaluation | 12-lead ECG | FRD0.2431 | 11 | |
| Simulating composite drug reactions | Clinical ECG Lid+Dof (test) | Accuracy76.47 | 11 | |
| Simulating composite drug reactions | Clinical ECG Mox+Dil (test) | Accuracy84.31 | 11 | |
| Simulating composite drug reactions | Clinical ECG Mex+Dof (test) | Accuracy61.82 | 11 | |
| Expert Realism Classification | ECG Lead V1 | Accuracy53 | 5 | |
| Expert Realism Classification | ECG Lead V2 | Accuracy55 | 5 | |
| Expert Realism Classification | ECG Lead V3 | Accuracy53.5 | 5 | |
| Expert Realism Classification | ECG Lead V4 | Accuracy54 | 5 | |
| Expert Realism Classification | ECG Lead V5 | Accuracy51.5 | 5 |