Conghao Xiong

Dianzhi Yu, Conghao Xiong, Yankai Chen et al.

Survival prediction of cancers is crucial for clinical practice, as it informs mortality risks and influences treatment plans. However, a static model trained on a single dataset fails to adapt to the dynamically evolving clinical environment and continuous data streams, limiting its practical utility. While continual learning (CL) offers a solution to learn dynamically from new datasets, existing CL methods primarily focus on unimodal inputs and suffer from severe catastrophic forgetting in survival prediction. In real-world scenarios, multimodal inputs often provide comprehensive and complementary information, such as whole slide images and genomics; and neglecting inter-modal correlations negatively impacts the performance. To address the two challenges of catastrophic forgetting and complex inter-modal interactions between gigapixel whole slide images and genomics, we propose ConSurv, the first multimodal continual learning (MMCL) method for survival analysis. ConSurv incorporates two key components: Multi-staged Mixture of Experts (MS-MoE) and Feature Constrained Replay (FCR). MS-MoE captures both task-shared and task-specific knowledge at different learning stages of the network, including two modality encoders and the modality fusion component, learning inter-modal relationships. FCR further enhances learned knowledge and mitigates forgetting by restricting feature deviation of previous data at different levels, including encoder-level features of two modalities and the fusion-level representations. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark integrating four datasets, Multimodal Survival Analysis Incremental Learning (MSAIL), for comprehensive evaluation in the CL setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConSurv outperforms competing methods across multiple metrics.

Zhengrui Guo, Conghao Xiong, Jiabo Ma et al.

Few-shot learning presents a critical solution for cancer diagnosis in computational pathology (CPath), addressing fundamental limitations in data availability, particularly the scarcity of expert annotations and patient privacy constraints. A key challenge in this paradigm stems from the inherent disparity between the limited training set of whole slide images (WSIs) and the enormous number of contained patches, where a significant portion of these patches lacks diagnostically relevant information, potentially diluting the model's ability to learn and focus on critical diagnostic features. While recent works attempt to address this by incorporating additional knowledge, several crucial gaps hinder further progress: (1) despite the emergence of powerful pathology foundation models (FMs), their potential remains largely untapped, with most approaches limiting their use to basic feature extraction; (2) current language guidance mechanisms attempt to align text prompts with vast numbers of WSI patches all at once, struggling to leverage rich pathological semantic information. To this end, we introduce the knowledge-enhanced adaptive visual compression framework, dubbed FOCUS, which uniquely combines pathology FMs with language prior knowledge to enable a focused analysis of diagnostically relevant regions by prioritizing discriminative WSI patches. Our approach implements a progressive three-stage compression strategy: we first leverage FMs for global visual redundancy elimination, and integrate compressed features with language prompts for semantic relevance assessment, then perform neighbor-aware visual token filtering while preserving spatial coherence. Extensive experiments on pathological datasets spanning breast, lung, and ovarian cancers demonstrate its superior performance in few-shot pathology diagnosis. Codes are available at https://github.com/dddavid4real/FOCUS.

Conghao Xiong, Hao Chen, Hao Zheng et al.

Survival analysis, as a challenging task, requires integrating Whole Slide Images (WSIs) and genomic data for comprehensive decision-making. There are two main challenges in this task: significant heterogeneity and complex inter- and intra-modal interactions between the two modalities. Previous approaches utilize co-attention methods, which fuse features from both modalities only once after separate encoding. However, these approaches are insufficient for modeling the complex task due to the heterogeneous nature between the modalities. To address these issues, we propose a Biased Progressive Encoding (BPE) paradigm, performing encoding and fusion simultaneously. This paradigm uses one modality as a reference when encoding the other. It enables deep fusion of the modalities through multiple alternating iterations, progressively reducing the cross-modal disparities and facilitating complementary interactions. Besides modality heterogeneity, survival analysis involves various biomarkers from WSIs, genomics, and their combinations. The critical biomarkers may exist in different modalities under individual variations, necessitating flexible adaptation of the models to specific scenarios. Therefore, we further propose a Mixture of Multimodal Experts (MoME) layer to dynamically selects tailored experts in each stage of the BPE paradigm. Experts incorporate reference information from another modality to varying degrees, enabling a balanced or biased focus on different modalities during the encoding process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method on various datasets, including TCGA-BLCA, TCGA-UCEC and TCGA-LUAD. Codes are available at https://github.com/BearCleverProud/MoME.

Conghao Xiong, Zhengrui Guo, Zhe Xu et al.

Deep learning has advanced computational pathology but expert annotations remain scarce. Few-shot learning mitigates annotation burdens yet suffers from overfitting and discriminative feature mischaracterization. In addition, the current few-shot multiple instance learning (MIL) approaches leverage pretrained vision-language models to alleviate these issues, but at the cost of complex preprocessing and high computational cost. We propose a Squeeze-and-Recalibrate (SR) block, a drop-in replacement for linear layers in MIL models to address these challenges. The SR block comprises two core components: a pair of low-rank trainable matrices (squeeze pathway, SP) that reduces parameter count and imposes a bottleneck to prevent spurious feature learning, and a frozen random recalibration matrix that preserves geometric structure, diversifies feature directions, and redefines the optimization objective for the SP. We provide theoretical guarantees that the SR block can approximate any linear mapping to arbitrary precision, thereby ensuring that the performance of a standard MIL model serves as a lower bound for its SR-enhanced counterpart. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SR-MIL models consistently outperform prior methods while requiring significantly fewer parameters and no architectural changes.