HGASurv: Hierarchical Granularity-Aware Multimodal Integration for Survival Prediction

Overview & Synopsis

Multimodal survival prediction jointly analyzes histopathological whole-slide images (WSIs), genomic profiles, and clinical variables to stratify patients by risk. However, existing approaches often inadequately account for granularity differences across modalities, particularly in spatial organization and feature dimensionality. Within pathology, aggregating WSI patch features without preserving their spatial arrangement can obscure tissue architecture; across modalities, directly concatenating low-dimensional clinical variables with high-dimensional visual and genomic features may limit the contribution of clinical information to prediction. To address these challenges, we propose HGASurv, which introduces a hierarchical WSI encoding module and a clinical-guided graph propagation module for granularity-aware multimodal integration. The hierarchical WSI encoding module maps WSI patch features onto a spatial grid using their original coordinates and applies parallel convolutions to construct representations at patch, local-neighborhood, and regional scales. Genomic signature embeddings then query these scale-specific WSI representations through cross-modal co-attention, producing signature-conditioned morphological features. The clinical-guided graph propagation module uses clinical variables to define patient-similarity edges and propagates fused image-genomic node embeddings with graph attention, integrating clinical information through topology rather than feature concatenation. Across three TCGA cohorts, HGASurv achieved the strongest overall C-index performance, with ablation studies supporting the complementary contributions of the hierarchical WSI encoding and clinical-guided graph propagation modules. This design shows that matching representation and integration mechanisms to modality-specific granularity improves multimodal survival prediction.