Oncology

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8 papers in the last four weeks, down 50% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 212

Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

Learning Clinical-Trial Strategy: Offline Policy Training for Decision Agents

Clinical development is sequential decision-making under uncertainty, where a sponsor must plan a portfolio of experiments from heterogeneous evidence. We study this setting by framing oncology clinical development as an offline decision-making problem in which an agent predicts the next six-month trial portfolio of an oncology drug program from information available at the decision date. To support this, we construct a temporal dataset that combines 31.7k heterogeneous public data records, including trial registries, regulatory reviews, sponsor filings, utilization data, and epidemiology, into 881 offline decision episodes across 45 historical programs. We compare four offline objectives: behavioral cloning, reward-weighted behavioral cloning, learned-reward training, and value-based implicit Q-learning against four frontier LLM agents that share a common date-gated retrieval scaffold across held-out drug, sponsor, drug-class, and temporal splits. Models trained offline outperform the non-fine-tuned baselines, particularly in the post-August 2025 contamination-clean holdout. Reward-weighted behavioral cloning performs the best, obtaining 46.2% indication F1 and 14.2% strict F1 against 25.0% and 2.1%, respectively, for the best-performing tool agent on each metric. These results suggest that structured offline learning can teach agents to plan clinical experiments.

William Bolton, Philip Torr

Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.

Clinical Decision-Making Imitation Learning Offline RL Oncology

Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

CIGTSurv: Clinical Information Guided Tri-modal Survival Prediction with Local Prototype Association and Global Feature Alignment

Multimodal learning has significantly advanced survival prediction by integrating pathology images with genomic data. However, clinical information, despite its critical role in reflecting a patient' s overall health, remains underutilized due to its discrete, sparse, and low-dimensional nature. Furthermore, the inherent heterogeneity across these modalities pose significant challenges in modeling cross-modal interactions. In this paper, we propose CIGTSurv, a Clinical Information Guided Tri-modal framework for Survival prediction. Specifically, we first design a holistic text template and use pretrained foundation models to transform clinical tabular data into high-dimensional tokenized embeddings. Using clinical information as an anchor, we then introduce a dual-level interaction mechanism: 1) a local prototype association (LPA) module based on cross-attention to explicitly learn token-level correspondences between different modalities, and 2) a global feature alignment (GFA) loss based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to implicitly enhance cross-modal distribution consistency. Extensive experiments on five TCGA cancer cohorts demonstrate that CIGTSurv achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) survival prediction performance. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Daijing-ai/CIGT-Surv.git.

Jing Dai, Qibin Zhang, Weiwei Zhou +4

Cancer Hospital of Dalian University of Technology, Shenyang, China · School of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Medicine, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China · Institute of Pathology, Technical University of Munich, TUM School of Medicine and Health, Munich, Germany +2

Cancer Survival Prediction Survival Analysis Cross-Modal Alignment Oncology Multimodal Survival Analysis Multimodal Fusion

Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

TumorBoard: Evidence-Grounded Multi-Agent Decision Support for Longitudinal Neuro-Oncology

Neuro-oncology decisions require coordinated interpretation of serial MRI, pathology, molecular markers, treatment history, performance status, and evolving guidelines. We present TumorBoard, a multi-agent decision-support system built around a shared longitudinal case state and an auditable claim-evidence ledger. Specialist agents for radiology, neuropathology, molecular diagnosis, guidelines, and therapy planning produce atomic claims with provenance. An adversarial critic exposes contradictions, and a safety governor releases, qualifies, or defers recommendations according to evidence sufficiency and temporal validity. On a 360-case hidden benchmark at a matched token budget, TumorBoard achieved an action F1 of 0.772 and evidence entailment of 0.914. It exceeded the strongest typed-council baseline by 3.1 percentage points (95% CI: 1.6 to 4.7, adjusted p = 0.0012), while recommendation-to-evidence coverage reached 0.927. Under evidence deletion, the system deferred 84.2% of unsafe cases and limited harmful recommendations to 5.8%. The safety governor reduced harmful release by 7.8 percentage points at a false-deferral cost of 4.3 percentage points. Ablation studies of the ledger, critic, and governor produced the predicted failure patterns, establishing structured coordination as the source of the measured multi-agent advantage.

Yantong Liu, Zheyu Zhang, Runpeng Liu +3

Department of Computer Information Engineering, Kunsan National University, Gunsan 54150, Republic of Korea · School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Multi-Agent Coordination Healthcare Clinical Decision Support Clinical Reasoning Oncology Multi-Agent Reasoning

Aug 4, 2026cs.NE

NeuroMosaic: Anatomically Grounded Multimodal Large Language Modeling for Molecularly Aware Glioma Reasoning from 3D MRI and Clinical Narratives

Multimodal medical large language models remain structurally weak for neuro-oncology because volumetric evidence is compressed into generic visual tokens and diagnostic conclusions often lack an auditable link to MRI regions. We present NeuroMosaic, a 3D multimodal language model that converts multi-sequence brain MRI into anatomy-indexed regional tokens, aligns them with clinical narrative and molecular concepts, and generates evidence-linked outputs. The architecture combines a multi-resolution volumetric tokenizer, a neuroanatomical graph router, a molecular concept memory, and selective risk control. Across four glioma cohorts, NeuroMosaic achieved an internal subtype macro-F1 of 0.827 and external macro-F1 values of 0.784, 0.761, and 0.742. On UPenn-GBM, it improved over the strongest matched-input baseline by 3.6 percentage points (95% CI: 1.8 to 5.4, adjusted p = 0.0018), with IDH, 1p/19q, and MGMT AUROCs of 0.918, 0.861, and 0.781. Evidence pointing accuracy reached 0.703, and targeted evidence deletion reduced correct-answer probability by 0.187, compared with 0.046 for random deletion. These results establish anatomy-indexed routing as a measurable mechanism for accurate, grounded, and calibrated volumetric medical-language reasoning.

Yantong Liu, Zheyu Zhang, Runpeng Liu +3

Department of Computer Information Engineering, Kunsan National University, Gunsan 54150, Republic of Korea · School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Multimodal Large Language Models Medical VLMs Oncology Explainable Medical Image Analysis Brain Tumor Classification

Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

Spatial proteomics guided by H&E-based AI reveals recurrence-risk niches in triple-negative breast cancer

Deep learning models can predict cancer recurrence from H&E stained slides, but the localized molecular states underlying these predictions remain largely obscured. Here, we developed an outcome informed spatial pathology framework in TNBC that integrates AI generated recurrence risk heatmaps with mass spectrometry based spatial proteomics. In a cohort of 156 patients, distribution based aggregation of high scoring patches achieved an AUC of 0.77 and a C-index of 0.77 in an independent test cohort. Bulk proteomics associated high image derived risk with cell cycle and genome maintenance programs and low risk with immune activation. High and low risk patches coexisted within the same tumor compartment and displayed distinct nuclear and architectural features, revealing intratumoral heterogeneity beyond tissue compartment identity. We then used the heatmaps as coordinate level guides to physically isolate and profile 46 AI defined tumor regions from two recurrence patients. Spatial proteomic profiling revealed a concordant molecular contrast across both patients: mitotic programs were enriched in high risk regions and immune and antigen presentation programs in low risk regions. A 13 protein composite derived from these spatial contrasts showed a trend toward poorer recurrence-free survival with increasing scores in an expanded cohort, while the corresponding transcript based composite stratified recurrence free survival in the independent METABRIC TNBC cohort. Integrating the protein composite with the H&E derived risk score improved the out of bag C-index from 0.679 to 0.739 and enhanced time dependent discrimination at 3 and 5 years. Together, these findings define a new role for outcome trained AI models as spatially explicit experimental guides that connect prognostic morphology with localized molecular states and advance biologically grounded, multiscale biomarker discovery in TNBC.

Yesung Cho, Ji Hwan Park, Chanil Kim +27

OmixAI Co. Ltd., Seoul, Republic of Korea · Meteor Biotech Co. Ltd., Seoul, Republic of Korea · Oncocross Co. Ltd., Seoul, Republic of Korea +4

Breast Cancer Computational Pathology Cancer Survival Prediction Clinical Outcome Prediction Oncology Whole-Slide Image Analysis

Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

CorePath: A Breast-Specialized Pathology Foundation Model for Core Needle Biopsy Diagnosis and Risk-Controlled Report Generation

Breast core needle biopsy (CNB) is central to breast cancer diagnosis yet remains challenging because limited tissue sampling, lesion heterogeneity, and subtle morphologic overlap can obscure subtype distinctions. We developed CorePath, a breast-specialized multimodal pathology foundation model fine-tuned from PRISM using 7901 paired CNB whole-slide images and diagnostic reports from two centers. Evaluated across six CNB cohorts and two public breast pathology benchmarks without task-specific retraining, CorePath consistently outperformed PRISM across cancer detection, invasion assessment, and histological subtyping. It achieved weighted area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUCs) of 0.9526-0.9735 for five-class CNB histological subtyping across private centers. On public benchmarks, CorePath outperformed leading pathology foundation models, achieving the highest weighted AUCs of 0.7780 for BCNB invasive carcinoma subtyping, 0.8178 for BRACS lesion stratification, and 0.8252 for BRACS fine-grained classification. In report generation, CorePath reduced the overall non-breast hallucinations from 30.1% to 2.8%, demonstrating improved domain fidelity after breast-specific adaptation. CorePath-CRG further combined conformal filtering of subtype and binary cancer status predictions with Learn-Then-Test-based threshold calibration to support selective narrative release, diagnostic fallback, and deferral. CorePath-CRG achieved zero non-breast hallucinations among released outputs and showed the strongest overall performance in pathologist-validated LLM-based Evaluation Scores and quantitative report-generation metrics across most centers. These results demonstrate that domain-specialized foundation models with statistical risk control offer a promising approach for accurate breast CNB diagnosis and reliable report generation.

Ting Yin, Danning Li, Chen Shu +17

Department of Pathology, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China · Institute of Clinical Pathology, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) +7

Breast Cancer Medical Report Generation Medical Diagnosis Pathology Foundation Models Oncology Histopathology Image Classification

Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

SAGE: Semantic Explainability of Attention-Based Survival Models in Computational Pathology

Attention-based multiple instance learning (ABMIL) is the predominant approach for slide-level prediction in computational pathology, yet its attention maps provide only local explanations: they indicate where a model focuses but not which histological features drive its predictions or how the model behaves across a patient cohort. We present Semantic Attention Global Explanations (SAGE), a post-hoc framework that extracts global, language-grounded explanations from a frozen ABMIL model. Using a pathology vision-language model, SAGE scores image patches against a dictionary of 25 histological concepts, aggregates these scores according to the model's learned attention, and quantifies how each concept relates to prediction risk across a cohort. Applied to survival prediction using seven TCGA cancer cohorts and three foundation models, SAGE recovered established prognostic features, such as the adverse association of necrosis, while revealing cancer-specific biology, including a favorable angiogenic signature in renal cell carcinoma consistent with known molecular subtypes. Ablation studies demonstrated that these associations depend on the model's learned attention rather than concept prevalence alone, and that the concept dictionary captures much of the prognostic information encoded by the foundation model features. Through semantically-grounded explanations, SAGE provides a scalable, model-agnostic framework for understanding what ABMIL survival models learn, enabling pathologists to interpret model behavior at the cohort level and offering the potential for biomarker identification.

Abdallah Lamane, Abdul Rahman Diab, Ren-Chin Wu +1

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA · Department of Data Science, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA · Department of Pathology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA +2

Computational Pathology Cancer Survival Prediction Concept-Based Explanations Oncology Explainable Medical Image Analysis Multiple Instance Learning

Aug 3, 2026cs.CE

TransNRank: Towards Accurate Neoantigen Ranking with Transformer

Personalized neoantigen prediction is challenging due to the scarcity of positive samples, the noise of the experimental data, the severe class imbalance trait and the complex of immunogenicity features. Prior arts, such as linear regression and XGBoost fail to model long-range dependencies and contextual relationships within peptide features, therefore the performance of neoantigen positive recall rate is limited. In this paper, we present a novel deep learning framework based on Transformer, coined as TransNRank. By leveraging the self-attention mechanism, our model captures both local and global feature contexts, enabling more accurate recognition of immunogenic neoantigens. A positive-aware training objective is utilized to handle the class imbalance problem, assigning more weights to those few positive samples. Extensive experiments are performed on NCI, TESLA and HiTIDE datasets. Notably, our TransNRank can push the upper bound top 20 recall rate of neoantigen prediction from 46.9% (45 from 96) to 53.1% (51 from 96), while reducing the training epochs from 200 epochs to 20 epochs. Furthermore, we analyze the features contribution based on TransNRank and find that the mutation at anchor and TCGA expression level play an unexpected important role in neoantigen prediction, and removing insignificant features to reduce the input dimensionality of peptides does not drastically impair the overall performance of the model. Our paradigm not only streamlines the prediction pipeline but also sets a new state-of-the-art for neoantigen discovery, with broad implications for accurate immuno-oncology.

Zhiyin An, Yuenan Hou, Shumeng Duan +3

Learning to Rank Oncology

Aug 2, 2026cs.CV

Harnessing Adversarial Distillation to Customise Debiased, Disease-Specific Pathology Foundation Models for Breast Cancer

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) provide strong tissue representations and have become central to digital pathology. However, deployment in disease-specific settings is limited by 1) the high computational cost of billion-parameter PFMs and 2) distribution mismatch and non-biological bias inherited from pan-cancer, multi-centre pre-training, including site-specific signatures and imbalanced disease prevalence. These factors can encourage shortcut learning and under-emphasise subtle morphology required for reliable modelling of a specific cancer type. We present SmartStu (a Smart Student), a framework to customise compact, breast-cancer-specific PFMs via distillation whilst mitigating confounding. SmartStu distils representations from multiple teacher PFMs into a lightweight student backbone. Crucially, we introduce adversarial distillation that leverages a dedicated noise model trained to predict nuisance, edge-dominated cues on the distillation set. Using this noise model as a counterexample, the adversarial objective encourages the student to recognise, yet suppress, features predictive of nuisance targets. We further incorporate multi-teacher ensemble distillation and an auxiliary self-supervised objective with artefact injection. We validate SmartStu on three external cohorts (Yale HER2, SLN-Breast, and BRACS) with multiple tiny backbones. SmartStu yields breast-cancer-specific PFMs that are over

30\times

smaller than general PFMs whilst largely preserving, and sometimes improving, downstream performance measured by balanced accuracy (bAcc) and AUC. Code is available at https://github.com/zwchen03/advDistall.

Zhiwei Chen, Yang Hu, Yuxiang Xiao +7

School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, China · School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, University of Leicester, UK · Leicester Cancer Research Centre, University of Leicester, UK +4

Computational Pathology Pathology Foundation Models Oncology Shortcut Learning Knowledge Distillation Adversarial Knowledge Distillation

Aug 1, 2026cs.CV

Zero-Cost Virtual RNA: Approximating Immunotherapy Signatures via Cross-Modal WSI Retrieval

Identifying the

Inflamed'' immunophenotype in Gastric Adenocarcinoma predicts immunotherapy response but requires an expensive 10-gene RNA signature. While deep learning on standard H\&E slides offers a scalable alternative, conventional binary classifiers oversimplify continuous RNA data and introduce label noise. To resolve this, we propose VITA (VIrtual Transcriptomic Approximation). By aligning H\&E and RNA into a joint latent space during training, VITA requires only standard H\&E at inference to retrieve morphologically similar historical cases and approximate the continuous RNA signature. Achieving 0.72 classification accuracy and a 0.66 Spearman correlation, VITA provides a cost-effective

virtual transcriptomics'' pre-screening tool that preserves the continuous phenotypic spectrum without requiring genomic sequencing.

Sigrid Vila-Bagaria, Mar Teixidó, Miquel Piñol +3

Image Processing Group, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain · Research group of Cancer Biomarkers & Oncological Pathology, IRB Lleida, Spain

Computational Pathology Cross-Modal Retrieval Oncology Gene Expression Prediction from Histopathology Images Whole-Slide Image Analysis

Aug 1, 2026cs.CV

Structured Proxy Features for Multimodal NSCLC Survival Prediction from Pretreatment CT

Lung cancer results in roughly 1.8 million fatalities annually worldwide, with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) comprising the majority of cases. Despite advancements in treatment, survival stratification remains challenging due to intratumoral heterogeneity inadequately captured by conventional descriptors. Standard radiomic and deep learning techniques regard imaging features as independent quantities, overlooking structured interactions between tumor characteristics. We evaluate whether structured proxy features can enhance multimodal NSCLC survival prediction by augmenting pretreatment computed tomography (CT) representations, radiomics, and clinical variables with six simulation-derived features designed to capture interactions between heterogeneity and morphology. A radiomic-parameterized cellular automaton generates growth-rate and necrosis-ratio proxy features from baseline CT by using entropy and sphericity to compute low-dimensional proxy parameters. The imaging backbone is a Transformer-based Masked Autoencoder (TMAE), which was chosen after a systematic evaluation with alternative encoders within the same pipeline and provides attention-based visualizations that highlight tumor regions receiving higher model attention. On the public Lung1 cohort (n = 390), the primary four-modality fusion attained a C-index of 0.641 (iAUC 0.731, log-rank p < 0.001). The primary result compares favorably with prior multimodal results on Lung1 (C-index 0.631; iAUC 0.592 [15]) under a comparable evaluation protocol, while a separate exploratory coefficient-optimization analysis achieved a best observed C-index of 0.662 (iAUC 0.748). These results indicate that, in addition to conventional radiomic, deep, and clinical representations within the Lung1 benchmark, simulation-derived proxy features may provide complementary predictive information within this fixed Lung1 benchmark.

Huu Phong Nguyen, Delower Hossain, Ehsan Saghapour +2

Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, School of Medicine, The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), Birmingham, AL, United States. · Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), Birmingham, AL, United States. · System Pharmacology and AI Research Center (SPARC), The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), Birmingham, AL, United States.

Cancer Survival Prediction Oncology Multimodal Survival Analysis Radiomics Multimodal Fusion

Jul 31, 2026cs.CV

What Carries the Signal in Pathology Foundation-Model Atlases? A Patient-Level Controlled Benchmark in Breast Cancer

Pathology foundation models are reported to encode molecular programmes in tissue morphology, but the evidence is usually a cohort-wide ranked gene list rather than a prediction for a held-out patient. We rebuild such an analysis with the patient as the unit of evidence and ask which pipeline component carries signal. Across 11 frozen backbones, four pre-specified gene programmes and 285 TCGA-BRCA patients with paired slides and RNA-seq (44 cells; GroupKFold by patient, all preprocessing fitted inside the fold), ridge regression on mean-pooled embeddings predicts held-out programme scores at Spearman rho = 0.25-0.56, UNI2 strongest on all four (immune 0.556). A matched permutation null gives raw p ~ 1e-4 at 10,000 permutations for every cell; Holm-adjusted p = 0.0044. The signal is real but not uniformly morphological. Against competing models on the same patients and folds, embeddings beat tissue composition for ER/luminal, proliferation and immune (+0.280, +0.284, +0.479; p <= 0.003) but not basal, where compartment fractions alone reach 0.469 against the embedding's 0.493 (p = 0.77). Fifty-four interpretable cell-count features come within 0.043-0.085 on every programme. The geometric machinery contributes nothing measurable, and we identify why: the geodesic graph selects neighbours by Euclidean nearest-neighbour search and only reweights edges already chosen, so the topology is Euclidean by construction (Riemannian minus Euclidean = +0.0010, 95% CI [-0.0007, +0.0029]). Applied consistently the geometry is worse (-0.0117). Ridge regression beats the graph-and-metric decoder by +0.097 (CI [+0.069, +0.127]). The driver-count metric common in this literature is near-uninformative here: 91.8% of random six-gene panels recover >=5/6 drivers.

Chimdi Walter Ndubuisi

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA

Breast Cancer Computational Pathology Pathology Foundation Models Manifold Learning Oncology Medical Image Representation Learning+1

Jul 29, 2026cs.CV

HERMES: A Hybrid Ensemble for Head-and-Neck Tumor Segmentation, TN Staging, and Recurrence-Free Survival on PET/CT

We present HERMES (Hybrid Ensemble for Radiotherapy-target segmentation, Malignancy staging, and Event-free Survival), a single containerized algorithm for the three HECKTOR 2026 subtasks: segmentation of the primary tumor (GTVp) and pathological lymph nodes (GTVn), radiological T/N staging, and recurrence-free survival (RFS), computed from a paired FDG-PET/CT scan and an electronic health record. A 10-fold ensemble of STU-Net Small networks produces the segmentation; the predicted mask then drives two downstream tasks. Rather than pass a generic radiomics vector to the staging models, we derive from the predicted masks a compact set of geometry features aligned with the size and number axes of AJCC/UICC 7th-edition radiological N/T staging. On internal cross-validation these features raise N-stage balanced accuracy from 0.691 to 0.720 (+0.030), our largest single design gain, at lower feature dimensionality. For prognosis we combine complementary deep and clinical risk experts in an equal-weight ensemble, and train one deep expert with a concordance-tracking survival loss of our own, whose value approximates the concordance index during training. Every component was selected on honest out-of-fold predictions under a regularization-oriented protocol, with no tuning on the public validation set, and deployed as two decorrelated submissions. On the HECKTOR 2026 validation leaderboard, HERMES achieved a weighted score of 0.6454 (Mean Dice 0.641, T balanced accuracy 0.580, N balanced accuracy 0.642, RFS C-index 0.679) and qualified for the testing phase. Team: AMC_HNC.

Kai Wang, Meixu Chen, Elie Nasr +2

Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, CO, USA

Cancer Survival Prediction PET/CT Imaging Medical Image Segmentation Oncology PET/CT Tumor Segmentation

Jul 28, 2026cs.CV

Comparing the Performance of Foundation Model Derived Embeddings with Traditional Approaches for Distant Metastasis Prediction in Head and Neck Cancer

Background: Early prediction of distant metastasis (DM) risk in head and neck cancer (HNC) can enable timely interventions that may improve treatment outcomes. Many current machine learning methods rely on prior knowledge of the region of interest such as tumor segmentations, which require expert knowledge, is time-consuming and introduces user-dependent variability. Medical image-based foundation models have recently been developed for specific imaging modalities to streamline down-stream prediction tasks by extracting modality-relevant features. Purpose: In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of using a foundation model as the feature extractor to predict DM risk in HNC patients and compare its performance with traditional approaches that require prior knowledge on the regions of interest. Methods: Preoperative CT images of 2327 patients from the RADCURE dataset were used. Three features-sets were created including radiomics, deep-learning based features, and CT Foundation derived features. The feature-sets were used individually in a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to predict DM risk. Results: The model using CT Foundation embeddings outperformed the radiomics and deep learning-based models, achieving a Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.791, compared to AUC values of 0.772 and 0.753 for the radiomics and deep learning-based models, respectively. The CT Foundation based model had similar performance to a model that combined the use of radiomics and deep learning-based features that achieved an AUC of 0.794. Conclusions: Features based on foundation models offer a promising alternative to traditional radiomics while reducing the need for domain expertise and extensively annotated datasets. Their minimal preprocessing requirements also make them a more accessible and scalable option.

Erich Schmitz, Meixu Chen, Bowen Jing +1

Advanced Imaging and Informatics for Radiation Therapy (AIRT) and Medical Artificial Intelligence and Automation (MAIA) Laboratory, Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas

Medical Imaging Foundation Models Clinical Outcome Prediction Oncology Radiomics

Jul 28, 2026cs.CV

Where Physics Meets Privacy: Federated PINNs for Privacy-Preserving Brain Tumor Biomechanical Modeling

Brain tumors such as glioma, meningioma, and pituitary adenoma alter the mechanical behavior of soft brain tissue, yet common diagnostic methods rely on static imaging that cannot capture tumor growth, tissue displacement, or changes in stiffness over time. Deep learning models for this task typically require pooling patient data at one site, which conflicts with privacy rules such as GDPR and HIPAA and limits generalization across institutions, a challenge that is pronounced in neuro oncology given patient diversity. This study presents a federated physics informed neural network combining federated learning with a physics informed loss built on the equations of linear elasticity. Three simulated clinical sites each train a local network on patient specific MRI data using a physics informed loss, and only model weights are shared with a central server through the FedAvg protocol over one hundred rounds, keeping raw data at its site of origin. The federated model reached an overall accuracy of 91.4%, against 90.0% for a non federated baseline trained on pooled data, an average AUC of 0.985 across tumor classes, and a rise in pituitary tumor accuracy from 85.6 to 94.5%. Training produced smooth, divergence free displacement fields consistent with expected tissue deformation, showing that federated training can be paired with physics based constraints without a meaningful loss in performance.

Mahmuda Akter Sristy, Md Al-Mahfuz Chowdhury, Momota Ahsana Meem +2

Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, United International University Dhaka, Bangladesh

Privacy-Preserving ML Oncology Physics-Informed ML Federated Learning

Jul 27, 2026cs.CV

Effect of User-Prompted Priors on Semi-Automated Cancer Lesion Segmentation in Whole-Body Computed Tomography

In clinical oncology studies, metastatic cancer is commonly evaluated using "Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors" (RECIST), in which the diameter of up to five lesions is measured and followed over the course of treatment. However, RECIST shows limited correlation with overall survival. Total tumour volume (TTV) is a stronger predictor but typically relies on manual ground-truth segmentation of all lesions, which is time-consuming and requires expert domain knowledge. Semi-automated approaches leveraging user-prompted priors, such as bounding boxes and single-slice contours, as inputs to automated segmentation methods can facilitate the generation of ground-truth segmentations. This work investigates the impact of different user-prompted priors on semi-automated cancer lesion segmentation performance in whole-body computed tomography. Across 3-fold cross-validation and external testing, more complex spatial priors consistently improved performance, with contour priors from three orthogonal planes (axial, coronal and sagittal) achieving the best results. On the external test (n=3865 lesions), this approach achieved a mean Dice score of 0.882, compared to a mean Dice score of 0.671 for the baseline model with no spatial prior. These findings suggest that the use of multi-plane orthogonal user-prompted priors can improve semi-automated tumour lesion segmentation and support efficient generation of high-quality volumetric ground-truth data.

Isac Stark, Johan Öfverstedt, Elin Lundström +3

Department of Surgical Sciences, Uppsala University, Sweden · Department of Surgical Sciences, SciLifeLab, Uppsala University, Sweden · Antaros Medical, Mölndal, Sweden

Interactive Medical Image Segmentation Medical Image Segmentation Oncology Computed Tomography

Jul 26, 2026cs.CV

Weakly Supervised Instance-Level Gleason Pattern Estimation Using Primary and Secondary Labels

In prostate cancer histopathology, the Gleason Score is determined by the most frequent (Primary) and second most frequent (Secondary) Gleason patterns within a whole-slide image. Although these slide-level labels are routinely available in clinical practice, instance-level Gleason annotations are rarely provided, making patch-level learning challenging. We propose a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) framework that estimates instance-level Gleason patterns from slide-level Primary and Secondary labels. The proposed method formulates instance-level learning according to the clinical definition of the Gleason Score by aggregating instance predictions into class counts and explicitly modeling the Primary pattern, Secondary pattern, and their dominance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed formulation enables effective instance-level learning and outperforms existing MIL approaches on the SICAP-MIL dataset.

Nao Sugeta, Kaito Shiku, Shinnosuke Matsuo +1

Kyushu University, Japan

Weakly Supervised Learning Oncology Multiple Instance Learning Whole-Slide Image Analysis Automated Grading

Jul 25, 2026cs.CV

Inverse Bayesian Inference for Extracting Lesion Dynamics from Longitudinal Spectral CT

Longitudinal medical imaging captures temporal evolution of lesions, yet extracting the underlying dynamical parameters governing this evolution remains challenging. We propose an inverse Bayesian framework for inferring lesion dynamics from longitudinal spectral CT. We decompose spectral feature (

x

) evolution into three components: \begin{equation*} \frac{dx_i}{dt} = A_i x_i + B \cdot n + C \cdot Δx_{\text{sat}} \end{equation*} where

A_i

captures intrinsic dynamics (lesion-autonomous evolution),

B

captures local environment tumour burden (organ tumour burden through satellite count coupling), and

C

captures environment/satellite state change (i.e., whether surrounding lesions move similarly or not). We demonstrate the framework on photon-counting NSCLC CT data from metastases, recovering distinct dynamical regimes: lung lesions exhibit significant satellite count coupling (

B=-0.34

,

p<0.05

) suggesting competitive dynamics, while liver lesions show synergistic satellite behaviour coupling (

C\approx+1.0

,

p<0.05

). Synthetic validation confirms parameter recovery, and cross-coupling analysis validates that our method detects non-zero coupling when present. This work establishes inverse dynamical inference as a principled methodology for extracting interpretable parameters from longitudinal imaging, moving beyond static feature extraction toward mechanistic characterisation of lesion behaviour. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/lukasf98/inverse-bayesian-inference

Lukas Förner, Melina Wördehoff, Julian Steffens +6

Dept. of diagnostic and interventional Radiology and Neuroradiology, University Hospital Augsburg, Germany · Digital Medicine, University Hospital Augsburg, Germany · Chair for Computer-Aided Medical Procedures and Augmented Reality, Technical University of Munich, Germany +5

Latent Dynamics Modeling Bayesian Inverse Problems Longitudinal Medical Image Analysis Oncology

Jul 23, 2026stat.ME

A Multi-Cohort Validation of Censoring-Aware Conformal Lower Predictive Bounds for Pathology Survival Models

Whole-slide survival models commonly provide risk rankings without calibrated statements about individual event times. We evaluate fixed-cutoff drcosarc, a post-hoc conformal wrapper for discrete-time multiple-instance learning survival heads using frozen UNI2-h representations, in an internal 18-configuration sweep across five TCGA cohorts and an external five-configuration evaluation across three CPTAC cohorts. We distinguish configuration--fold--split summaries of the inverse-probability-of-censoring-weighted (IPCW) estimate and median lower predictive bound (LPB) from a hierarchy-aware patient-ensemble estimand of the mean drcosarc--naive LPB difference. At

α=0.1

, the drcosarc IPCW estimate was nearest 0.90 in KIRC, LUAD, and STAD. Patient-ensemble drcosarc--naive intervals excluded zero in KIRC, KIRP, STAD, UCEC, and CPTAC-CCRCC, but included zero in internal LUAD, CPTAC-LUAD, CPTAC-UCEC, and the internal LUSC extension. In a 20-replicate low-censoring semi-synthetic setting with known event times, drcosarc empirical coverage was 0.9129 [0.9053, 0.9207]. An exploratory analysis supported a head-error-by-censoring interaction within that data-generating process. In a two-cohort ABMIL sensitivity analysis, increasing the hazard grid to

K=16

raised localized marginal IPCW estimates above the prespecified 0.87 threshold and yielded positive paired LPB differences, although worst-group estimates remained below 0.87. Overall, performance was cohort dependent, and its interpretation changed with the patient-level unit, estimand, and censoring assumptions.

Mingi Hong

Independent Researcher

Computational Pathology Cancer Survival Prediction Survival Analysis Conformal Prediction Oncology Regression Prediction Intervals

Jul 22, 2026q-bio.GN

Foundation-model-guided radiogenomic discovery linking cancer genomes to cancer scans

The function of many genes is still unknown, and conventional driver-discovery methods, which rely on how frequently a gene is mutated, cannot assess genes that are only rarely affected. Here we pair Evo2-based genome analysis with routine clinical imaging to identify gene--phenotype associations at genome-wide scale. For every somatic mutation across three TCGA cohorts (cRCC=clear cell renal cell carcinoma, HCC=hepatocellular carcinoma, and BC=breast cancer; $n = 340$ total), Evo2 predicts a severity score, with no task-specific training. Per-gene severity summaries are then correlated with radiomic features extracted from paired tumor segmentations, controlling for total mutation burden. In TCGA-cRCC (

n = 162

), this sweep recovers established renal-cancer drivers and identifies 46 additional genes reaching false discovery rate (FDR) significance absent from curated cancer-gene panels, several of which are Mendelian ciliopathy and cytoskeletal-disease genes. These results demonstrate that pairing a genomic language model with widely available clinical imaging can serve as a hypothesis-free discovery tool for gene--imaging associations invisible to conventional approaches.

Frederik Hauke, Jeremias Krause, Patrick Wienholt +6

Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, University Hospital RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany · Center for Human Genetics and Genomic Medicine, University Hospital RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany · Department of Nephrology, Rheumatology and Immunology (Medical Clinic II), University Hospital RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany +3

Cancer Genomics Oncology Genomics

Jul 21, 2026cs.CV

Pathologist Attention-Aligned Report Generation for Prostate Histopathology

The allocation of visual attention by pathologists during cancer diagnosis is a highly selective process that critically shapes the information extracted from whole-slide images (WSIs). Human attention helps medical imaging tasks such as classification and segmentation, and becomes a strong semantic cue for identifying diagnostically informative regions for report generation. In this paper, we introduce human attention into the training of pathologist report generation models. To this end, we collected a multimodal human-attention dataset of 121 prostate WSIs annotated with pathologists' multi-scale viewport trajectories synchronized with the pathologists' verbal descriptions and cursor movements for five clinically relevant components (e.g., Gleason patterns). Using this dataset, we finetune two report generation models with an attention-alignment loss that regularizes the model attention over image patches to match the distribution of pathologist attention. We evaluate our approach on prostate cancer report generation and visual question answering using two models with different internal attention mechanisms (i.e., how image tokens are integrated into the language decoder). Experiments show average gains of 10.9% on NLP-based metrics and 19.3% in accuracy across five clinically relevant report components. Further, model attention maps extracted at inference time, with minimal computational overhead, align more closely with pathologist attention, providing stronger visual support for the generated reports by highlighting the regions that most influence the output.

Ruoyu Xue, Suryakant Singh, Souradeep Chakraborty +12

Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, USA · Department of Biomedical Informatics, Stony Brook University, USA · Université Paris-Saclay, CentraleSupélec, Gustave Roussy, INSERM, IHU PRISM, Cancer Data Science Unit, France +4

Computational Pathology Medical Report Generation Medical VQA Oncology Whole-Slide Image Analysis

Jul 21, 2026cs.CV

Weakly Supervised Pathology-Informed Representation Learning for PET-Based Content Retrieval of Intra-Tumour Heterogeneity

We propose a weakly supervised 18FFDG PET representation-learning framework for content based medical image retrieval, using H&E derived information during training while preserving PET-only inference. The proposed method was designed to use H&E derived information during training while maintaining PET only inference. A teacher student training strategy was used to learn the PET tumour derived voxel representations, from which global and hotspot conditioned embeddings were generated along with maps of intra tumour heterogeneity in our oesophegeal cancer test case. A progressive ablation strategy was used to evaluate the contribution of different supervision mechanisms. Retrieval performance was assessed across cross-validation folds using metrics including mean average precision, normalised discounted cumulative gain and mean reciprocal rank. Additional analyses evaluated ablation performance, hotspot faithfulness through perturbation/deletion experiments, prototype-specific PET uptake behaviour and indirect patient level concordance between learned PET prototype classes and selected histomic features. Progressive introduction of pathology informed supervision and hotspot modelling improved PET retrieval performance compared with global PET representations and conventional PET baselines. Across the ablation ladder, PET hotspot conditioned representations consistently provided stronger retrieval than global embeddings, indicating that focusing on informative tumour subregions improved sensitivity to intra tumour heterogeneity. Histopathology concordance further showed that the learned classes were not simply high uptake PET regions; instead, they demonstrated distinct heterogeneity in 18F FDG uptake.

Rajat Vashistha, Sandra Brosda, Lauren G. Aoude +8

School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Behavioural Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia · 2Frazer Institute, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Behavioural Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia · Department of Surgical Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. +2

Cross-Modal Representation Learning Oncology Medical Image Representation Learning

Jul 20, 2026cs.CV

GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash: Efficient Pathology Foundation Models for Whole-Slide and Tumor Microenvironment Analysis

Foundation models have emerged as a driving force in computational pathology, with the potential to transform cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment selection by learning transferable representations from large-scale histopathology data. A growing landscape of pathology foundation models now spans diverse data sources, architectures, and downstream applications. However, most pretrained models operate only at the image-tile level, use restrictive licenses, and remain computationally expensive, limiting large-scale slide-level clinical and research use. Here, we introduce GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash, efficient models for whole-slide pathology AI and spatial proteomics prediction. GigaPath-Flash combines a 22M-parameter ViT-S tile encoder with a 21M-parameter LongNet slide encoder, both pretrained on large-scale real-world histopathology data. Its compact tile encoder is distilled from the billion-parameter GigaPath (ViT-g) teacher and shared by both models. GigaPath-Flash retains 97% of GigaPath's average slide-level performance with 50x less compute. GigaTIME-Flash extends this backbone to predict the tumor immune microenvironment directly from routine H&E images. It surpasses the original CNN-based GigaTIME in prediction quality while running 6x faster and using 8x less GPU memory. Together with GigaPath and GigaTIME, these models form an open-weight, Apache-2.0-licensed family pretrained on large-scale real-world clinical data. By releasing all models and weights, we provide accessible building blocks for computational pathology, immuno-oncology, and precision health.

Naoto Usuyama, Jeya Maria Jose Valanarasu, Sicong Yao +27

Microsoft Research · Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington · Providence Genomics +2

Pathology Foundation Models Oncology Whole-Slide Image Analysis

Jul 20, 2026cs.CV

Medical Imaging Fusing Vision Transformer: Laryngeal Cancer Screening with Explanation

Early and timely screening of laryngeal cancer is crucial for improving clinical outcomes. In recent years, NBI endoscopy has become a standard diagnostic tool for the detection of laryngeal lesions. However, its effective use requires well-trained clinicians and the procedure is time-consuming and subject to interobserver variability. In this context, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) offers a promising solution to support clinical decision-making. In this work, we proposed applying transformer and attention mechanism for analyzing the narrow band imaging and distinguish benign and malignant lesions. Results show it has good classification performance with F1 (82.72%), accuracy(82.33%). In addition, the result of laryngeal cancer screening is explainable for clinicians. The explainability is utilizing the state of art segmentation method (MedSAM) to provide the useful pathological information area for clinicians. The proposed methodology fusing classification and segmentation provides a translating on laryngeal cancer screening.

Haiyang Wang, Luca Mainardi

Department of Electrical, Information and Bioengineering Polytechnic University of Milan Milan, Italy · Department of of Electrical, Information and Bioengineering Polytechnic University of Milan Milan, Italy

Endoscopy Medical Imaging Medical Image Classification Oncology

Jul 16, 2026cs.CV

Causal-Adversarial Probing of Clinical Covariates for Prostate MRI Grading

Deep learning models for prostate MRI-based cancer grading may encode clinical covariates that either reflect useful disease-related signal or non-generalising shortcut information, but their role is usually assumed. We propose a causal-reasoning framework for probing covariate dependence in MRI-based International Society of Urological Pathology (ISUP) Grade Group prediction. Rather than treating mpMRI as a direct cause of grade, we model MRI appearance and ISUP grade as observations of latent tumour pathology, and test whether candidate clinical variables act as nuisance correlates, disease-related proxies, or irrelevant covariates in the learned representation. We implement this using an adversarial framework that suppresses the decodability of individual clinical covariate at a time while preserving MRI-based grade prediction. The approach is developed and evaluated on 2,903 prostate MRI examinations, with external validation on 576 patients. We report a set of interesting and previously under-explored imaging-to-clinical-variable interactions in the context of deep learning generalisation. For examples, in binary ISUP Grade Group

\geq2

classification, suppressing age, BMI, and alcohol use improved AUC by 1.23%, 0.84%, and 1.42%, respectively (all p < 0.05), suggesting reduced non-generalising covariate information; In contrast, suppressing PSA and prostate volume degraded AUC by 1.91% and 7.61% (all p < 0.001), indicating that these variables carried task-relevant signal. These findings show that adversarial covariate suppression can provide a practical representation-level analysis for distinguishing potentially harmful dependence from informative signal in prostate MRI grading models.

Yipei Wang, Shiqi Huang, Wen Yan +6

UCL Hawkes Institute, University College London, London, UK · Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, London, UK · Department of Urology, University College London Hospital, London, UK +4

Causal Representation Learning Medical Image Classification Spurious Correlation Robustness Oncology

Jul 15, 2026cs.LG

AI-Augmented Adaptive Digital Twin Modeling for Brain Tumor Evolution Prediction and Treatment Scheduling

Brain tumor progression exhibits spatially heterogeneous growth, patient-specific treatment response, and complex interactions with surrounding anatomy, making accurate long-term prediction challenging. We propose an AI-augmented adaptive digital twin (DT) framework for brain tumor evolution prediction and treatment scheduling. The framework integrates an interpretable reaction--diffusion (RD) model, a 3D residual learning module for model-form correction, patient-specific DT updating during recursive rollout, and model predictive control (MPC) for constrained chemotherapy and radiotherapy scheduling. Experiments on 387 synthetic tumor trajectories with 120-step evolution show that the baseline RD model captures tumor location and overall temporal behavior but underestimates heterogeneous tumor burden during long-horizon prediction. Hybrid RD--residual modeling reduces masked voxel-wise mean squared error by 84.3% and increases Dice overlap by 43.5% relative to the RD baseline under dense simulated observations. Online DT updating further reduces mean squared error by 45.9% and improves Dice overlap by 9.6% compared with the non-updated hybrid model. In MPC-based scheduling simulations, the updated DT controller reduces final tumor burden by 22.4% relative to a fixed treatment schedule under the terminal-burden objective. Together, these results demonstrate a unified framework for patient-specific initialization, mechanistic modeling, adaptive learning, and constrained treatment optimization. Although validated using patient-data-informed synthetic trajectories rather than clinical longitudinal data, the proposed framework establishes a foundation for future translation to real-world adaptive treatment planning.

Wenxi Liu, Michael Trimboli, Xianqi Li

Department of Mathematics and Systems Engineering, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL, 32901, USA

Dynamical Systems Healthcare Clinical Prediction Oncology Digital Twins

Jul 15, 2026cs.CV

Multimodal Assessment of Pancreatic Cancer Resectability Using Deep Learning

Accurate determination of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) resectability relies on evaluating how the tumor interacts with major peripancreatic vessels on CT imaging, yet expert assessment often shows substantial variability. We introduce a fully automated multimodal deep learning framework that jointly analyzes 3D contrast enhanced CT and structured clinical information to classify patients into the three National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) resectability categories (upfront resectable, borderline resectable, locally advanced). The approach uses a Swin-UNETR backbone to obtain anatomy aware image representations through auxiliary segmentation of pancreas, tumor, and vascular structures. These features are fused with a compact clinical embedding derived from 17 routinely collected variables and processed by a lightweight classification head. Model training is guided by a dynamic multitask objective that adapts the balance between segmentation and classification based on current tumor Dice performance, promoting feature representations that remain both anatomically informed and discriminative.

Vincent Ochs, Christoph Kuemmerli, Florentin Bieder +12

University of Basel, Department of Biomedical Engineering, 4123 Allschwil, Switzerland · Clarunis, University Digestive Health Centre, Basel, Switzerland · Department of General Surgery, Kantonsspital Aarau, Tellstrasse, 5000, Aarau, Switzerland +3

3D Medical Imaging Multimodal Classification Medical Image Classification Oncology

Jul 15, 2026cs.CV

TRACE-PCa: Predicting Prostate Cancer Progression from Longitudinal MRI During Active Surveillance

Active surveillance (AS) is the preferred strategy for favorable-risk prostate cancer, yet current protocols rely on scheduled repeat biopsies, most of which reveal no progression and are unnecessary. Existing risk-stratification tools operate on single time-point imaging or depend on explicit lesion segmentation, limiting their ability to capture longitudinal change and excluding patients without an MRI-visible lesion. In this study, we propose an end-to-end temporal and multimodal model for predicting pathological progression during AS without lesion segmentation. We encode each serial scan with a pretrained 3D MRI foundation model and introduce a temporal attention gate that recalibrates the multi-visit features to amplify focal imaging changes associated with progression. The gated imaging representation is then fused with clinical variables in a multimodal framework to estimate the probability of progression. Validated on a longitudinal AS cohort, our approach consistently outperforms competing baselines and performs comparably to the radiologist assessment representing current clinical practice. It maintains high negative predictive value while achieving higher positive predictive value, demonstrating its potential to safely reduce unnecessary biopsies during surveillance.

Hongye Zeng, Shreeram Athreya, Dingyuan Dai +4

Department of Radiological Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA · Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA · Department of Urology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA +2

Longitudinal Medical Image Analysis Clinical Outcome Prediction Oncology

Jul 15, 2026cs.CV

Marker-free deformable registration and fusion for augmented reality-guided positive margin localization during tumor resection surgery

Positive margins in head and neck oncologic surgery require mapping specimen-side pathology findings to the patient resection bed. This is challenging because pathologists identify the positive margin on slices of the resected, deformed specimen, while surgeons must relocate the corresponding site on the resection bed using only verbal descriptions and no visual guidance. We present a marker-free augmented reality (AR) workflow for mapping a margin label from a three-dimensional specimen scan to the resection bed. The method combines contour-constrained deformation, residual alignment to a depth scan, surface-based fusion to a head-mounted display, and target projection onto the reconstructed bed. Bead-suture correspondences estimate specimen deformation, whereas patient-to-display fusion does not require external fiducial markers. Following formative experiments, five residents and surgeons performed cadaveric cheek and scalp re-resection tasks under verbal guidance, verbal guidance with specimen examination, and AR guidance. Deformation target errors were

7.63 \pm 3.74

mm for the cheek and

3.72 \pm 1.02

mm for the scalp; residual specimen-to-bed distances were

2.43 \pm 2.15

mm and

2.19 \pm 1.06

mm, respectively. Fusion error did not differ significantly between marker-free and marker-based methods on either cadaver; overall marker-free fusion error was

2.15 \pm 0.87

mm. End-to-end margin localization error decreased from

21.40 \pm 3.84

mm with verbal guidance and

16.09 \pm 4.30

mm with specimen examination to

6.19 \pm 1.79

mm with AR guidance (

p < 0.001

). Online fusion required

5.23 \pm 0.34

s. These results demonstrate effective marker-free AR guidance for positive-margin localization and support more precise tumor resection.

Yue Yang, Annie Benson, Matthieu Chabanas +7

Vanderbilt University, 1400 18th Avenue South, Nashville, Tennessee, 37212, USA · Vanderbilt University Medical Center, 1211 Medical Center Drive, Nashville, Tennessee, 37232, USA

Medical Image Registration Oncology Deformable Image Registration Medical Image Localization

Jul 14, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Binary Detection: A Multi-Dimensional Taxonomy of Cancer Misinformation on Reddit

Cancer-related discussions on social media provide an important space for information exchange and peer support, but also facilitate the spread of misinformation that may influence prevention, screening, and treatment decisions. Existing research on cancer misinformation often relies on narrow definitions, small-scale datasets, or binary labeling frameworks. We introduce a multi-dimensional taxonomy for characterizing cancer misinformation in Reddit discussions of breast, lung, colon, and prostate cancer. The taxonomy captures seven dimensions, including misinformation presence, information type, risk level, stance, and topical focus. Using expert-annotated data, we evaluate multiple large language models (LLMs) for scalable misinformation annotation and analyze cancer misinformation across Reddit communities. Our results show that cancer-related misinformation constitutes approximately 6% of Reddit cancer discussions, with substantial variation across communities and misinformation topics. Few-shot prompting substantially improves classification performance, particularly for nuanced taxonomy dimensions. We additionally identify recurring misinformation narratives centered on unsupported treatments, distrust of conventional medicine, and misleading claims about diagnosis and screening. Our taxonomy, dataset, and findings provide a foundation for multi-dimensional modeling of online cancer misinformation.

Aria Pessianzadeh, Pooriya Jamie, Naima Sultana +6

Drexel University · UCLA

Fake News Detection Oncology