Dual-stream cross-modal fusion alignment network for survival analysis.

Abstract

Survival prediction serves as a pivotal component in precision oncology, enabling the optimization of treatment strategies through mortality risk assessment. While the integration of histopathological images and genomic profiles offers enhanced potential for patient stratification, existing methodologies are constrained by two fundamental limitations: (i) insufficient attention to fine-grained local features in favor of global representations, and (ii) suboptimal cross-modal fusion strategies that either neglect intrinsic correlations or discard modality-specific information. To address these challenges, we propose DSCASurv, a novel cross-modal fusion alignment framework designed to explore and integrate intrinsic correlations across multimodal data, thereby improving the accuracy of survival prediction. Specifically, DSCASurv leverages the local feature extraction capabilities of convolutional layers and the long-range dependency modeling of scanning state space models to extract intra-modal representations, while generating cross-modal representations through dual parallel mixer architectures. A cross-modal attention module functions as a bridge for inter-modal information exchange and complementary information transfer. The framework ultimately integrates all intra-modal representations to generate survival predictions by enhancing and recalibrating complementary information. Extensive experiments on five benchmark cancer datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to existing methods.