Multi-omics fusion with soft labeling for enhanced prediction of distant metastasis in nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients after radiotherapy

Omics fusion has emerged as a crucial preprocessing approach in medical image processing, significantly assisting several studies. One of the challenges encountered in integrating omics data is the unpredictability arising from disparities in data sources and medical imaging equipment. Due to these differences, the distribution of omics futures exhibits spatial heterogeneity, diminishing their capacity to enhance subsequent tasks. To overcome this challenge and facilitate the integration of their joint application to specific medical objectives, this study aims to develop a fusion methodology for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) distant metastasis prediction to mitigate the disparities inherent in omics data. The multi-kernel late-fusion method can reduce the impact of these differences by mapping the features using the most suiTable single-kernel function and then combining them in a high-dimensional space that can effectively represent the data. The proposed approach in this study employs a distinctive framework incorporating a label-softening technique alongside a multi-kernel-based Radial basis function (RBF) neural network to address these limitations. An efficient representation of the data may be achieved by utilizing the multi-kernel to map the inherent features and then merging them in a space with many dimensions. However, the inflexibility of label fitting poses a constraint on using multi-kernel late-fusion methods in complex NPC datasets, hence affecting the efficacy of general classifiers in dealing with high-dimensional characteristics. The label softening increases the disparity between the two cohorts, providing a more flexible structure for allocating labels. The proposed model is evaluated on multi-omics datasets, and the results demonstrate its strength and effectiveness in predicting distant metastasis of NPC patients.