Contrastive Transformer-Driven Discovery of Temporal Hemodynamic Subphenotypes in Cardiac Surgery Patients

Abstract Cardiac surgery patients experience rapidly evolving hemodynamics in early post-operative period requiring intensive support. Identifying hemodynamic subphenotypes from these data can inform personalized management. Using 24-hour high-resolution physiologic and treatment data from 6,630 MIMIC-IV and 1,963 SICdb patients, we trained a transformer encoder with a reconstruction-contrastive objective to derive patient-level embeddings capturing multivariate temporal dynamics within first 24h of ICU stay and compared them against those generated by dynamic time warping (DTW). Spectral clustering uncovered three reproducible hemodynamic subphenotypes. Compared with subphenotype 1, subphenotype 3 received more IV fluids, vasopressors, inotropes, and exhibited higher in-hospital mortality (OR 5.85, 95 % CI 2.43-14.13), longer ICU stay (7.12 days, 95% CI: 5.52-8.73) and hospitalization (8.86 days, 95% CI: 6.57-11.16). DTW derived subphenotypes had weaker prognostic separation. Thus, contrastive-transformer framework identified more clinically meaningful temporal hemodynamic subphenotypes that may optimize post-operative risk stratification and inform personalized management.