HFBSurv: hierarchical multimodal fusion with factorized bilinear models for cancer survival prediction

Cancer survival prediction can greatly assist clinicians in planning patient treatments and improving their life quality. Recent evidence suggests the fusion of multimodal data, such as genomic data and pathological images, is crucial for understanding cancer heterogeneity and enhancing survival prediction. As a powerful multimodal fusion technique, Kronecker product has shown its superiority in predicting survival. However, this technique introduces a large number of parameters that may lead to high computational cost and a risk of overfitting, thus limiting its applicability and improvement in performance. Another limitation of existing approaches using Kronecker product is that they only mine relations for one single time to learn multimodal representation and therefore face significant challenges in deeply mining rich information from multimodal data for accurate survival prediction.

To address the above limitations, we present a novel hierarchical multimodal fusion approach named HFBSurv by employing factorized bilinear model to fuse genomic and image features step by step. Specifically, with a multiple fusion strategy HFBSurv decomposes the fusion problem into different levels and each of them integrates and passes information progressively from the low level to the high level, thus leading to the more specialized fusion procedure and expressive multimodal representation. In this hierarchical framework, both modality-specific and cross-modality attentional factorized bilinear modules are designed to not only capture and quantify complex relations from multimodal data, but also dramatically reduce computational complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method performs an effective hierarchical fusion of multimodal data and achieves consistently better performance than other methods for survival prediction.

HFBSurv is freely available at https://github.com/Liruiqing-ustc/HFBSurv.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.