Multi-modal machine learning for breast cancer recurrence prediction

Breast cancer recurrence, a leading cause of long-term mortality among survivors, requires timely and accurate risk assessment to guide follow-up care and treatment planning. Traditional predictive models, often limited to either structured or unstructured data alone, struggle to capture the full clinical context. This study examines the impact of integrating multi-modal clinical data, including treatment records, pathology reports, and clinician notes, on recurrence prediction. By integrating a rule-based regular expression extraction mechanism with a rigorous precedence-based conflict reconciliation strategy, our approach effectively recovers definitive tumor characteristics from free-text pathology narratives to augment structured records. We also benchmark performance against commonly used feature sets from prior breast cancer studies to assess the added value of multi-modal integration. Single-source and multi-modal inputs are evaluated across a range of machine learning models. Results show that multi-modal integration consistently improves predictive accuracy compared to single-modal methods.