Organizations: Cancer Hospital of Dalian University of Technology, Shenyang, China · School of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Medicine, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China · Key Laboratory of Integrated Circuit and Biomedical Electronic System, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
Recent advances in multimodal learning have significantly improved cancer survival risk prediction. However, the joint prognostic potential of protein markers and histopathology images remains underexplored, largely due to the high cost and limited availability of protein expression profiling. To address this challenge, we propose HGP-Mamba, a Mamba-based multimodal framework that efficiently integrates histological with generated protein features for survival risk prediction. Specifically, we introduce a protein feature extractor (PFE) that leverages pretrained foundation models to derive high-throughput protein embeddings directly from Whole Slide Images (WSIs), enabling data-efficient incorporation of molecular information. Together with histology embeddings that capture morphological patterns, we further introduce the Local Interaction-aware Mamba (LiAM) for fine-grained feature interaction and the Global Interaction-enhanced Mamba (GiEM) to promote holistic modality fusion at the slide level, thus capture complex cross-modal dependencies. Experiments on four public cancer datasets demonstrate that HGP-Mamba achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining superior computational efficiency compared with existing methods. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Daijing-ai/HGP-Mamba.git.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: HGP-Mamba overview. (a) Details of the proposed HGP-Mamba which is consisted of three steps: multi-modal feature extraction, feature interaction and enhancement and risk prediction. (b) Schematic of the Local Interaction-aware Mamba (LiAM). (c) Architecture of the Global Interaction-enhanced Mamba (GiEM).
Figure 2: Illustration of our protein feature extractor (PFE). Note that ConvNet is the backbone of the ROISE model.
Model
Datasets
COADREAD
KIRC
KIRP
LIHC
Overall
Mean-Pooling
0.673 ± 0.055
0.729 ± 0.048
0.818 ± 0.065
0.708 ± 0.059
0.732
Max-Pooling
0.603 ± 0.056
0.715 ± 0.053
0.782 ± 0.069
0.657 ± 0.094
0.689
ABMIL [ 10 ]
0.689 ± 0.071
0.741 ± 0.045
0.791 ± 0.099
0.721 ± 0.075
0.736
CLAM-SB [ 17 ]
0.681 ± 0.041
0.736 ± 0.055
0.838 ± 0.046
0.714 ± 0.083
0.742
CLAM-MB [ 17 ]
0.644 ± 0.069
0.744 ± 0.036
0.812 ± 0.075
0.702 ± 0.070
0.726
Table 1: C-index( ↑ ) performance(mean ± std) over four datasets. The best and second best results are highlighted in red and blue , respectively.
Figure 3: Kaplan-Meier survival curves of the proposed model on four cancer datasets.
Configuration
Datasets
COADREAD
KIRC
KIRP
LIHC
w/o PFE
0.687 ± 0.064
0.739 ± 0.027
0.786 ± 0.119
0.715 ± 0.087
w/o LiAM
0.629 ± 0.067
0.751 ± 0.045
0.781 ± 0.109
0.711 ± 0.083
w/o GiEM
0.681 ± 0.071
0.744 ± 0.045
0.800 ± 0.082
0.727 ± 0.079
Full (HGP-Mamba)
0.695 ± 0.069
0.755 ± 0.035
0.842 ± 0.054
0.739 ± 0.079
Table 2: Ablation study assessing the impact of three key modules in HGP-Mamba.
Figure 4: (a) Comparison of different multimodal fusion methods. (b) Inference time comparison with varying patches
Figure 5: Spatial expression heatmaps for PD-L1 on randomly selected slides from the TCGA-COADREAD dataset. For each sample, the left panel shows the WSI thumbnail, the middle panel overlays the predicted PD-L1 expression heatmap on the WSI, and the right panel displays the selected patches according to the predicted expression level.
Multimodal survival models can combine complementary prognostic information from whole-slide images and genomic profiles, but effective fusion remains challenging amid external cohort shift and computational complexity. To address these challenges, we propose MIST, multimodal survival prediction with genomic-guided histology attention. MIST represents genomic features as tokens and allows them to query compact foundation-model-derived histology context tokens before survival prediction. This design enriches molecular information with histology context rather than merging separately encoded modalities only at the final stage. Training combines discrete-time survival prediction with genomic feature masking, WSI dropout, and paired WSI-genomics contrastive alignment. Across four external evaluations in colon, renal, lung, and glioblastoma cohorts, MIST improves external C-index over standard fusion baselines in the primary comparisons. These results support genomic-guided histology attention as a compact and effective strategy for multimodal oncology outcome prediction. Our code is available at https://github.com/samiyavuuz/MIST .
Muhammet Sami Yavuz, Sabri Mustafa Kahya, Richard R. Chen +2
AI for Image-Guided Diagnosis and Therapy, School of Medicine and Health, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Munich, Germany · Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany +2
We propose a novel multimodal deep learning framework for patient-level survival prediction, which integrates whole-slide histology features, RNA-seq expression profiles, and clinical variables. Our architecture combines an ABMIL module~\cite{ilse2018attention} for slide-level representation with feedforward encoders for RNA and clinical data. These embeddings are then integrated through low-rank bilinear cross-modal fusion~\cite{liu2018efficient} to model conditional interactions across modalities while controlling parameter growth. The model outputs continuous risk scores that are subsequently mapped to survival times using a nonparametric calibration procedure based on the Kaplan--Meier estimator~\cite{kaplan1958nonparametric}. By decomposing multimodal reasoning into independent pairwise interactions, the proposed fusion design promotes structural interpretability and parameter efficiency compared with full tensor and hierarchical fusion strategies. Experiments on the CHIMERA challenge dataset demonstrate improved predictive performance over concatenation-based baselines and competitive generalization on hidden evaluation cohorts. These results indicate that the proposed framework is a promising approach for multimodal survival prediction in HR-NMIBC. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/hassancpu/ChimeraChallenge2025_Task_3.
Hassan Keshvarikhojasteh, Josien P. W. Pluim, Mitko Veta
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
To enhance the precision of cancer prognosis, recent research has increasingly focused on multimodal survival methods by integrating genomic data and histology images. However, current approaches overlook the fact that the proteome serves as an intermediate layer bridging genomic alterations and histopathological features while providing complementary biological information essential for survival prediction. This biological reality exposes another architectural limitation: existing integrative analysis studies fuse these heterogeneous data sources in a flat manner that fails to capture their inherent biological hierarchy. To address these limitations, we propose HFGPI, a hierarchical fusion framework that models the biological progression from genes to proteins to histology images from a systems biology perspective. Specifically, we introduce Molecular Tokenizer, a molecular encoding strategy that integrates identity embeddings with expression profiles to construct biologically informed representations for genes and proteins. We then develop Gene-Regulated Protein Fusion (GRPF), which employs graph-aware cross-attention with structure-preserving alignment to explicitly model gene-protein regulatory relationships and generate gene-regulated protein representations. Additionally, we propose Protein-Guided Hypergraph Learning (PGHL), which establishes associations between proteins and image patches, leveraging hypergraph convolution to capture higher-order protein-morphology relationships. The final features are progressively fused across hierarchical layers to achieve precise survival outcome prediction. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of HFGPI over state-of-the-art methods.
Junjie Zhou, Bao Xue, Meiling Wang +2
The College of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics · School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications