Jacqueline Michelle Metsch

arXiv2026

A Multimodal Dataset for Survival Prediction in Resected Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma

Survival research in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is limited by the scarcity of datasets linking whole-slide histology with clinical, molecular, and long-term outcome data. We present a retrospective single-centre cohort of 302 patients who underwent PDAC resection at University Medical Center Gottingen. The dataset comprises 446 H&E whole-slide images, clinicopathological variables, targeted sequencing data for 154 patients, and overall-survival outcomes. During follow-up, 253 patients died, and the median follow-up was 76 months. To establish initial reference values, we evaluated fourteen survival-prediction configurations using identical five-repetition Monte Carlo cross-validation partitions. Ridge Cox regression using numeric clinicopathological variables achieved a mean concordance of $0.649 \pm 0.042$ and $0.652 \pm 0.046$ after adding KRAS and TP53 mutation status. The image-only attention model achieved $0.603 \pm 0.030$, while multimodal fusion achieved $0.619 \pm 0.025$, the highest concordance among the neural models. These results establish promising initial benchmarks for future research using this pancreas-specific multimodal dataset, paving the way for external validation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

MGPATH: Vision-Language Model with Multi-Granular Prompt Learning for Few-Shot WSI Classification

Whole slide pathology image classification presents challenges due to gigapixel image sizes and limited annotation labels, hindering model generalization. This paper introduces a prompt learning method to adapt large vision-language models for few-shot pathology classification. We first extend the Prov-GigaPath vision foundation model, pre-trained on 1.3 billion pathology image tiles, into a vision-language model by adding adaptors and aligning it with medical text encoders via contrastive learning on 923K image-text pairs. The model is then used to extract visual features and text embeddings from few-shot annotations and fine-tunes with learnable prompt embeddings. Unlike prior methods that combine prompts with frozen features using prefix embeddings or self-attention, we propose multi-granular attention that compares interactions between learnable prompts with individual image patches and groups of them. This approach improves the model's ability to capture both fine-grained details and broader context, enhancing its recognition of complex patterns across sub-regions. To further improve accuracy, we leverage (unbalanced) optimal transport-based visual-text distance to secure model robustness by mitigating perturbations that might occur during the data augmentation process. Empirical experiments on lung, kidney, and breast pathology modalities validate the effectiveness of our approach; thereby, we surpass several of the latest competitors and consistently improve performance across diverse architectures, including CLIP, PLIP, and Prov-GigaPath integrated PLIP.

cs.CV↗