Nithya Bhasker

h-index3
2papers
62citations

2 Papers

1.5CVOct 4, 2023
Graph data modelling for outcome prediction in oropharyngeal cancer patients

Nithya Bhasker, Stefan Leger, Alexander Zwanenburg et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are becoming increasingly popular in the medical domain for the tasks of disease classification and outcome prediction. Since patient data is not readily available as a graph, most existing methods either manually define a patient graph, or learn a latent graph based on pairwise similarities between the patients. There are also hypergraph neural network (HGNN)-based methods that were introduced recently to exploit potential higher order associations between the patients by representing them as a hypergraph. In this work, we propose a patient hypergraph network (PHGN), which has been investigated in an inductive learning setup for binary outcome prediction in oropharyngeal cancer (OPC) patients using computed tomography (CT)-based radiomic features for the first time. Additionally, the proposed model was extended to perform time-to-event analyses, and compared with GNN and baseline linear models.

1.4LGJan 29
HistoPrism: Unlocking Functional Pathway Analysis from Pan-Cancer Histology via Gene Expression Prediction

Susu Hu, Qinghe Zeng, Nithya Bhasker et al.

Predicting spatial gene expression from H&E histology offers a scalable and clinically accessible alternative to sequencing, but realizing clinical impact requires models that generalize across cancer types and capture biologically coherent signals. Prior work is often limited to per-cancer settings and variance-based evaluation, leaving functional relevance underexplored. We introduce HistoPrism, an efficient transformer-based architecture for pan-cancer prediction of gene expression from histology. To evaluate biological meaning, we introduce a pathway-level benchmark, shifting assessment from isolated gene-level variance to coherent functional pathways. HistoPrism not only surpasses prior state-of-the-art models on highly variable genes , but also more importantly, achieves substantial gains on pathway-level prediction, demonstrating its ability to recover biologically coherent transcriptomic patterns. With strong pan-cancer generalization and improved efficiency, HistoPrism establishes a new standard for clinically relevant transcriptomic modeling from routinely available histology.