CIGTSurv: Clinical Information Guided Tri-modal Survival Prediction with Local Prototype Association and Global Feature Alignment

Abstract

Multimodal learning has significantly advanced survival prediction by integrating pathology images with genomic data. However, clinical information, despite its critical role in reflecting a patient' s overall health, remains underutilized due to its discrete, sparse, and low-dimensional nature. Furthermore, the inherent heterogeneity across these modalities pose significant challenges in modeling cross-modal interactions. In this paper, we propose CIGTSurv, a Clinical Information Guided Tri-modal framework for Survival prediction. Specifically, we first design a holistic text template and use pretrained foundation models to transform clinical tabular data into high-dimensional tokenized embeddings. Using clinical information as an anchor, we then introduce a dual-level interaction mechanism: 1) a local prototype association (LPA) module based on cross-attention to explicitly learn token-level correspondences between different modalities, and 2) a global feature alignment (GFA) loss based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to implicitly enhance cross-modal distribution consistency. Extensive experiments on five TCGA cancer cohorts demonstrate that CIGTSurv achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) survival prediction performance. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Daijing-ai/CIGT-Surv.git.