Uncertainty-Aware Survival Analysis with Dirichlet Distribution for Multi-Scale Pathology and Genomics

Over the last few decades, the integration of AI-driven computational techniques into digital pathology has revolutionized survival prediction tasks. However, most existing methods in survival analysis discretize the entire survival period into predefined intervals, overlooking the inherent uncertainty in event occurrence and the heterogeneity of patient survival times. The censored data further exacerbate these challenges, amplifying uncertainty and variability. To address these limitations, we introduce the Dirichlet distribution to model discretized outputs as continuous probability distributions, providing a more accurate representation of uncertainty awareness. Building upon this foundation, we propose a universal multi-modal survival analysis loss function that leverages uncertainty-driven fusion. Our Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Modal Survival Analysis (UMSA) framework further explores the interactions between multi-scale pathological images and genomic data, providing promising insights into multi-modal survival analysis. Experimental evaluations on five publicly available datasets demonstrate that UMSA achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating its effectiveness and scalability in survival prediction tasks.