Prognostic Value of Lung Ultrasound Biomarkers for Readmission Risk in Congestive Heart Failure: A Pilot Data-Driven Analysis

2026-05-15

AI Summary

Patients with congestive heart failure face a high risk of 30-day hospital readmission, yet current clinical prediction tools exhibit limited performance. This study presents the first systematic investigation of using in-hospital pulmonary ultrasound B-mode imaging for readmission risk stratification. We propose a spatiotemporal embedding approach based on a pretrained TSM ResNet-18 architecture, integrating multi-view representations, cross-zone lung enhancements, and temporal difference features. The model further incorporates interpretable biomarkers—such as lower-lung abnormalities and pleural line alterations—to enhance clinical relevance. The optimal model achieves an F1 score of 0.80 (95% CI: 0.62–0.96), demonstrating the potential of bedside ultrasound as a non-invasive, interpretable tool for risk stratification in heart failure management.

Abstract

Hospital readmission within 30 days of discharge is a leading driver of morbidity, mortality, and avoidable healthcare expenditure in congestive heart failure (CHF). Current clinical risk stratification tools rely primarily on non-imaging data and exhibit limited predictive performance. Point-of-care lung ultrasound (LUS) offers a sensitive, noninvasive window into the pulmonary congestion that characterizes CHF decompensation, yet its prognostic utility for readmission prediction remains largely unexplored. We present a pilot feasibility study, the first systematic machine learning study using B-mode LUS acquired during hospitalization to predict 30-day CHF readmission. Quantitative spatiotemporal embeddings are extracted from a pretrained Temporal Shift Module (TSM) ResNet-18 encoder, and interpretable biomarker features are separately evaluated. Through structured ablations over lung view, temporal representation, multi-view fusion, and cross-lung augmentation, we identify the key imaging factors driving readmission risk. Our findings reveal that (1) dependent lower-lung regions (Left-3, Right-3) carry the strongest prognostic signal, consistent with their greater susceptibility to hydrostatic congestion; (2) temporal difference features between sequential examinations substantially outperform single-timepoint representations, highlighting the importance of capturing disease trajectory; and (3) multi-view feature concatenation yields the best overall performance, with our top MLP model achieving an F1 score of 0.80 (95% CI: 0.62-0.96). Biomarker analysis further reveals that pleural-line abnormalities, including breaks and indentations, are as informative as the canonical A-line and B-line markers. These results support POCUS-derived biomarkers as practical, interpretable tools for noninvasive CHF risk stratification.

Problem

• lung ultrasound
• congestive heart failure
• readmission risk
• prognostic biomarkers
• point-of-care ultrasound

Innovation

• lung ultrasound
• machine learning
• temporal shift module
• biomarker
• readmission prediction