Cancer is a pressing public health problem and one of the main causes of mortality worldwide. The development of advanced computational methods for predicting cancer survival is pivotal in aiding clinicians to formulate effective treatment strategies and improve patient quality of life. Recent advances in survival prediction methods show that integrating diverse information from various cancer-related data, such as pathological images and genomics, is crucial for improving prediction accuracy. Despite promising results of existing approaches, there are great challenges of modality gap and semantic redundancy presented in multiple cancer data, which could hinder the comprehensive integration and pose substantial obstacles to further enhancing cancer survival prediction. In this study, we propose a novel agnostic-specific modality learning (ASML) framework for accurate cancer survival prediction. To bridge the modality gap and provide a comprehensive view of distinct data modalities, we employ an agnostic-specific learning strategy to learn the commonality across modalities and the uniqueness of each modality. Moreover, a cross-modal fusion network is exerted to integrate multimodal information by modeling modality correlations and diminish semantic redundancy in a divide-and-conquer manner. Extensive experiment results on three TCGA datasets demonstrate that ASML reaches better performance than other existing cancer survival prediction methods for multiple data.

Accurate cancer survival prediction is crucial for oncologists to determine therapeutic plan, which directly influences the treatment efficacy and survival outcome of patient. Recently, multimodal fusion-based prognostic methods have demonstrated effectiveness for survival prediction by fusing diverse cancer-related data from different medical modalities, e.g., pathological images and genomic data. However, these works still face significant challenges. First, most approaches attempt multimodal fusion by simple one-shot fusion strategy, which is insufficient to explore complex interactions underlying in highly disparate multimodal data. Second, current methods for investigating multimodal interactions face the capability-efficiency dilemma, which is the difficult balance between powerful modeling capability and applicable computational efficiency, thus impeding effective multimodal fusion. In this study, to encounter these challenges, we propose an innovative multi-shot interactive fusion method named MIF for precise survival prediction by utilizing pathological and genomic data. Particularly, a novel multi-shot fusion framework is introduced to promote multimodal fusion by decomposing it into successive fusing stages, thus delicately integrating modalities in a progressive way. Moreover, to address the capacity-efficiency dilemma, various affinity-based interactive modules are introduced to synergize the multi-shot framework. Specifically, by harnessing comprehensive affinity information as guidance for mining interactions, the proposed interactive modules can efficiently generate low-dimensional discriminative multimodal representations. Extensive experiments on different cancer datasets unravel that our method not only successfully achieves state-of-the-art performance by performing effective multimodal fusion, but also possesses high computational efficiency compared to existing survival prediction methods.

MOTIVATION: Accurately predicting cancer survival is crucial for helping clinicians to plan appropriate treatments, which largely improves the life quality of cancer patients and spares the related medical costs. Recent advances in survival prediction methods suggest that integrating complementary information from different modalities, e.g. histopathological images and genomic data, plays a key role in enhancing predictive performance. Despite promising results obtained by existing multimodal methods, the disparate and heterogeneous characteristics of multimodal data cause the so-called modality gap problem, which brings in dramatically diverse modality representations in feature space. Consequently, detrimental modality gaps make it difficult for comprehensive integration of multimodal information via representation learning and therefore pose a great challenge to further improvements of cancer survival prediction. RESULTS: To solve the above problems, we propose a novel method called cross-aligned multimodal representation learning (CAMR), which generates both modality-invariant and -specific representations for more accurate cancer survival prediction. Specifically, a cross-modality representation alignment learning network is introduced to reduce modality gaps by effectively learning modality-invariant representations in a common subspace, which is achieved by aligning the distributions of different modality representations through adversarial training. Besides, we adopt a cross-modality fusion module to fuse modality-invariant representations into a unified cross-modality representation for each patient. Meanwhile, CAMR learns modality-specific representations which complement modality-invariant representations and therefore provides a holistic view of the multimodal data for cancer survival prediction. Comprehensive experiment results demonstrate that CAMR can successfully narrow modality gaps and consistently yields better performance than other survival prediction methods using multimodal data. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: CAMR is freely available at https://github.com/wxq-ustc/CAMR. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

The cuff-less blood pressure (BP) monitoring method based on photoplethysmo- gram (PPG) makes it possible for long-term BP monitoring to prevent and treat cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events. In this paper, a portable BP prediction system based on feature combination and artificial neural network (ANN) is implemented. The robustness of the model is improved from three aspects. Firstly, an adaptive peak extraction algorithm was used to improve the accuracy of peaks and troughs detection. Secondly, multi-dimensional features were extracted and fused, including three groups of PPG-based features and one group of demographics-based features. Finally, a two-layer feedforward artificial neural networks algorithm was used for regression. Thirty-three subjects distributed in the three BP groups were recruited. The proposed method passed the European Society of Hypertension International Protocol revision 2010 (ESP-IP2). Experimental results show that the proposed method exhibits good accuracy for a diverse population with an estimation error of -0.07 ± 4.47 mmHg for SBP and 0.00 ± 3.61 mmHg for DBP. Moreover, the model tracked the BP of two subjects for half a month, laying the foundation work for daily BP monitoring. This work will contribute to the long-term wellness management and rehabilitation process, enabling timely detection and improvement of the user's physical health.