IHCSurv: Effective Immunohistochemistry Priors for Cancer Survival Analysis in Gigapixel Multi-stain Whole Slide Images

Yejia Zhang, Hanqing Chao, Zhongwei Qiu, Wenbin Liu, Yixuan Shen, Nishchal Sapkota, Pengfei Gu, Danny Z. Chen, Le Lu, Ke Yan, Dakai Jin, Yun Bian, Hui Jiang

Abstract: Recent cancer survival prediction approaches have made great strides in analyzing H&E-stained gigapixel whole-slide images. However, methods targeting the immunohistochemistry (IHC) modality remain largely unexplored. We remedy this methodological gap and propose IHCSurv, a new framework that leverages IHC-specific priors to improve downstream survival prediction. We use these priors to guide our model to the most prognostic tissue regions and simultaneously enrich local features. To address drawbacks in recent approaches related to limited spatial context and cross-regional relation modeling, we propose a spatially-constrained spectral clustering algorithm that preserves spatial context alongside an efficient tissue region encoder that facilitates information transfer across tissue regions both within and between images. We evaluate our framework on a multi-stain IHC dataset of pancreatic cancer patients, where IHCSurv markedly outperforms existing state-of-the-art survival prediction methods. Our code is available on Github.