DRLSurv: Disentangled Representation Learning for Cancer Survival Prediction by Mining Multimodal Consistency and Complementarity

Accurate cancer survival prediction is crucial in devising optimal treatment plans and offering individualized care to improve clinical outcomes. Recent researches confirm that integrating heterogenous cancer data such as histopathological images and genomic data, can enhance our understanding of cancer progression and provides a multimodal perspective on patient survival chances. However, existing methods often over-look the fundamental aspects of multimodal data, i.e., consistency and complementarity, which in consequence significantly hinder advancements in cancer survival prediction. To address this issue, we represent DRLSurv, a novel multimodal deep learning method that leverages disentangled representation learning for precise cancer survival prediction. Through dedicated deep encoding networks, DRLSurv decomposes each modality into modality-invariant and modality-specific representations, which are mapped to common and unique feature subspaces for simultaneously mining the distinct aspects of cancer multimodal data. Moreover, our method innovatively introduces a subspace-based proximity contrastive loss and re-disentanglement loss, thus ensuring the successful decomposition of consistent and complementary information while maintaining the multimodal fidelity during the learning of disentangled representations. Both quantitative analyses and visual assessments on different datasets validate the superiority of DRLSurv over existing survival prediction approaches, demonstrating its powerful capability to exploit enriched survival-related information from cancer multimodal data. Therefore, DRLSurv not only offers a unified and comprehensive deep learning framework for advancing multimodal survival predictions, but also provides valuable insights for cancer prognosis and survival analysis.