用多模态模型从病理切片预测免疫标志物,助力精准肿瘤学
Predicting Immune Biomarkers with MultiModal Mixture-of-Expert Pathology Foundation Models Empowers Precision Oncology

- 融合图像、文本、转录组的专家混合架构,动态加权多模态信息
- 在17个蛋白标记上表现领先,相关性指标显著优于现有方法
- 适合病理医生与生物信息学者,推动计算病理临床转化
预测与肿瘤免疫微环境(TIME)相关的免疫生物标志物对推进精准肿瘤学至关重要,但现有方法多局限于单一图像模态,存在分辨率不足及临床与生物学信息利用不充分的问题。本文提出MixTIME,一种基于专家混合(MoE)架构的多模态基础模型,整合了针对不同模态训练的病理基础模型:仅图像(UNIv2)、图像+文本(CONCHv1.5)以及图像+转录组(STPath)表示,实现从苏木精-伊红(HE)全幻灯片图像中进行像素级和切片级的多重免疫荧光(mIF)蛋白表达预测。MixTIME采用可学习路由机制动态调整专家贡献,并使用分布与趋势感知损失函数进行训练。在两个不同规模的数据集上基准测试,其在17个蛋白标记上的相关性指标达到当前最优水平。预测的mIF谱图显著提升下游任务表现,包括空间区域识别、生存预测及由多位全球机构病理专家验证的AI辅助病理报告生成。此外,MixTIME可实现跨临床时间点的蛋白表达动态追踪,并揭示与药物耐受及免疫抑制相关的蛋白基因互作模式。总体而言,MixTIME为计算病理中的多模态生物标志物发现与临床转化提供了可扩展框架。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Predicting immune biomarkers associated with the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) is critical for advancing precision oncology, yet existing approaches are largely limited to single image modalities and suffer from insufficient resolution and incomplete utilization of complementary clinical and biological information. Here we introduce MixTIME, a multimodal foundation model that leverages a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to integrate pathology foundation models trained across distinct modalities: image only (UNIv2), image text (CONCHv1.5), and image transcriptomic (STPath) representations for pixel-level and slide-level prediction of multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) protein expression from hematoxylin and eosin (HE) whole-slide images. MixTIME employs a learnable router to dynamically weight expert contributions and is trained with a distribution- and tendency-aware loss function. Benchmarked on two datasets of different scales, MixTIME achieves state-of-the-art performance across 17 protein markers as measured by correlation metrics. The predicted mIF profiles substantially enhance downstream tasks, including spatial domain identification, survival prediction, and AI-assisted pathology report generation validated by expert pathologists from multiple institutes across the world. Furthermore, MixTIME enables longitudinal tracking of protein expression dynamics across clinical time points and reveals protein gene interaction patterns linked to drug resistance and immune suppression in tumor microenvironments. Collectively, MixTIME provides a scalable framework for multimodal biomarker discovery and clinical translation in computational pathology.
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