arXiv:2606.19966cs.CVcs.LG2026-06

用病理语义增强生存分析,提升跨中心泛化能力。

Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion for Domain-Robust Whole-Slide Survival Analysis

论文配图:Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion for Domain-Robust Whole-Slide Survival Analysis
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过视觉问答提取肿瘤等级等语义锚点,构建领域不变表示
  • 零样本跨四中心测试,平均C-index提升10.2%达最优
  • 融合不确定性建模与谨慎合并策略,避免错误关联导致过拟合

全切片图像(WSIs)广泛用于计算癌症预后,但现有方法多聚焦于单一中心表现,难以跨临床中心泛化。其根源在于依赖受染色和扫描仪差异影响严重的像素级表征。我们提出语义锚定证据融合生存分析框架(SAEFS),通过视觉问答(VQA)从WSIs中提取高阶病理语义(如肿瘤分级、微环境结构)作为领域不变的语义锚点;采用双流架构提取视觉证据,利用基于狄利克雷分布的主观逻辑建模不确定性,并通过谨慎合取规则融合语义与视觉证据,避免相关源导致的过度自信融合。仅在单源域训练,零样本评估跨四个未见域,SAEFS在预测准确性和可靠性上均优于当前最优模型,平均C-index提升10.2%。定量分析显示,VQA生成的语义特征跨中心差异显著低于像素特征,验证其在跨中心临床应用中的鲁棒性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Whole-slide images (WSIs) are widely used for computational cancer prognosis. However, most existing methods primarily focus on in-domain performance and fail to generalize across clinical centers. This limitation stems from their reliance on pixel-derived representations that are highly susceptible to domain-specific artifacts caused by staining protocols and scanner hardware. We hypothesize that high-level pathology semantics, such as tumor grade and micro-environmental architecture, provide a domain-invariant semantic representation that mirrors the robust diagnostic logic of human pathologists. Therefore, we propose a Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion Survival (SAEFS) framework, where SAEFS derives semantic anchors from WSIs via Visual Question Answering (VQA), employs a dual-stream WSI evidence extraction architecture, uses Dirichlet-based Subjective Logic to model uncertainty, and fuses semantic and visual evidence through a cautious conjunction rule to avoid overconfident fusion from correlated sources. Trained exclusively on one source domain and evaluated zero-shot across four unseen domains, SAEFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models both in prediction accuracy and reliability, improving the average C-index by 10.2%. Quantitative analyses further show that VQA-derived semantic features exhibit significantly lower cross-center divergence than pixel-derived features, highlighting their robustness for cross-center clinical applications.

生存分析病理图像跨中心泛化不确定性建模

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