UroFusion-X: a unified multimodal deep learning framework for robust diagnosis, subtyping, and prognosis of urological cancers

Multimodal clinical data, including imaging, pathology, omics, and laboratory tests, are often fragmented in routine practice, leading to inconsistent decision-making in the management of urological cancers. We propose UroFusion-X, a unified multimodal framework for integrated diagnosis, molecular subtyping, and prognosis prediction of bladder, kidney, and prostate cancers, with inherent robustness to missing modalities. The system incorporates 3D imaging encoders, pathology multiple-instance learning, omics graph networks, and a TabTransformer for laboratory and clinical variables. A cross-modal co-attention mechanism combined with a gated product-of-experts fusion strategy enables effective representation alignment across heterogeneous inputs, while anatomy-pathology consistency constraints and patient-level contrastive learning further enhance interpretability and generalization. Prognostic modeling is achieved via DeepSurv and DeepHit survival heads. Evaluated on a multi-center real-world cohort with external validation and leave-one-center-out testing, UroFusion-X consistently outperformed strong unimodal and simple fusion baselines, maintained over 90% of its predictive performance under substantial modality dropout, and demonstrated higher net clinical benefit in decision curve analysis. These results indicate that the proposed framework can improve decision consistency and reduce unnecessary testing when deployed in real clinical workflows.

Authors

Institutions

Publication Details

Journal
npj Digital Medicine
Published
2026-01-19
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-025-02295-6
Primary Topic
AI in cancer detection
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
Controls
|||
ALL TIME
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
article

UroFusion-X: a unified multimodal deep learning framework for robust diagnosis, subtyping, and prognosis of urological cancers

Yingming Xiao, Li Chen, Shengke Yang, Lei Zhong et al.
npj Digital Medicine
AI in cancer detection
article

UroFusion-X: a unified multimodal deep learning framework for robust diagnosis, subtyping, and prognosis of urological cancers

Yingming Xiao, Li Chen, Shengke Yang, Lei Zhong, Mingjing He, Yi Wu
article en

Abstract

Multimodal clinical data, including imaging, pathology, omics, and laboratory tests, are often fragmented in routine practice, leading to inconsistent decision-making in the management of urological cancers. We propose UroFusion-X, a unified multimodal framework for integrated diagnosis, molecular subtyping, and prognosis prediction of bladder, kidney, and prostate cancers, with inherent robustness to missing modalities. The system incorporates 3D imaging encoders, pathology multiple-instance learning, omics graph networks, and a TabTransformer for laboratory and clinical variables. A cross-modal co-attention mechanism combined with a gated product-of-experts fusion strategy enables effective representation alignment across heterogeneous inputs, while anatomy-pathology consistency constraints and patient-level contrastive learning further enhance interpretability and generalization. Prognostic modeling is achieved via DeepSurv and DeepHit survival heads. Evaluated on a multi-center real-world cohort with external validation and leave-one-center-out testing, UroFusion-X consistently outperformed strong unimodal and simple fusion baselines, maintained over 90% of its predictive performance under substantial modality dropout, and demonstrated higher net clinical benefit in decision curve analysis. These results indicate that the proposed framework can improve decision consistency and reduce unnecessary testing when deployed in real clinical workflows.

npj Digital MedicineVol. 9(1)
Sichuan Cancer Hospital (CN)
Peace, Justice and strong institutions
Openalex Percentile: Top 84%
AI in cancer detection
AI Navigator

Ask Laika to Summarize, Analyze, and Connect papers live on the map.

Summarize Papers & Methodologies

Extract key findings, datasets, and comparative methods across publications.

Benchmark Rankings & Visual Analytics

Rank top research institutions, authors, funders, topics, and journals by Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and paper volume with instant charts.

Connect Distant Disciplines

Bridge topological clusters on the map to find hidden collaborative intersections.