A Multimodal Sleep Foundation Model for Disease Prediction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sleep is a fundamental biological process with profound implications for physical and mental health, yet our understanding of its complex patterns and their relationships to a broad spectrum of diseases remains limited. While polysomnography (PSG), the gold standard for sleep analysis, captures rich multimodal physiological data, analyzing these measurements has been challenging due to limited flexibility across recording environments, poor generalizability across cohorts, and difficulty in leveraging information from multiple signals simultaneously. To address this gap, we curated over 585,000 hours of high-quality sleep recordings from approximately 65,000 participants across multiple cohorts and developed SleepFM, a multimodal sleep foundation model trained with a novel contrastive learning approach, designed to accommodate any PSG montage. SleepFM produces informative sleep embeddings that enable predictions of future diseases. We systematically demonstrate that SleepFM embeddings can predict 130 future diseases, as modeled by Phecodes, with C-Index and AUROC of at least 0.75 on held-out participants (Bonferroni-corrected p < 0.01). This includes accurate predictions for death (C-Index: 0.84 [95% CI: 0.81-0.87]), heart failure (C-Index: 0.80 [95% CI: 0.77-0.83]), chronic kidney disease (C-Index: 0.79 [95% CI: 0.77-0.81]), dementia (C-Index: 0.85 [95% CI: 0.82-0.87]), stroke (C-Index: 0.78 [95% CI: 0.76-0.81]), atrial fibrillation (C-Index: 0.78 [95% CI: 0.75-0.81]), and myocardial infarction (C-Index: 0.81 [95% CI: 0.78-0.84]). The model's generalizability was further validated through strong performance on the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS), a dataset unseen during pre-training. Additionally, SleepFM demonstrates strong performance on traditional sleep analysis tasks, achieving competitive results in both sleep staging (mean F1 scores: 0.70-0.78) and sleep apnea diagnosis (AUROC: 0.90-0.94). Beyond these standard applications, our analysis reveals that specific sleep stages and physiological signals carry distinct predictive power for different diseases. This work demonstrates how foundation models can leverage sleep polysomnography data to uncover the extensive relationship between sleep physiology and future disease risk.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".