MSKI-Net: Towards modality-specific knowledge interaction for glioma survival prediction

Gliomas hold a prominent position in neurooncology due to their high malignancy and poor survival rates. Accurately predicting the prognosis and survival risk of glioma patients is crucial for clinical treatment. Recent advances in survival prediction methods emphasize the importance of integrating complementary information from diverse modalities while neglecting the significant modality gap between pathological images and genomic data. To address this issue, we propose a modality-specific knowledge interaction network (MSKI-Net), which integrates whole slide images (WSI), RNA-Seq gene expression data, and copy number variation (CNV) data for glioma survival analysis. The MSKI-Net consists of a modality-specific feature enhancement (MSFE) module, a modality-interactive cross-attention (MICA) module, and a modality-specific knowledge-guided representation learning (MSKR) module. The three modules collaborate by complementing modality-specific features with modality-agnostic knowledge to improve the learning capability of MSKI-Net. Furthermore, we construct a dataset named TCGA<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">mm</inf>, which combines WSI, RNA-Seq, and CNV data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) to address the issue of data scarcity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSKI-Net achieves superior performance in predicting the survival risk of glioma cancer.