Cancer survival prediction requires integrating pathological Whole Slide Images (WSIs) and genomic profiles, a challenging task due to the inherent heterogeneity and the complexity of modeling both inter- and intra-modality interactions. Current methods often employ straightforward fusion strategies for multimodal feature integration, failing to comprehensively capture modality-specific and modality-common interactions, resulting in a limited understanding of multimodal correlations and suboptimal predictive performance. To mitigate these limitations, this paper presents a Multimodal Representation Decoupling Network (MurreNet) to advance cancer survival analysis. Specifically, we first propose a Multimodal Representation Decomposition (MRD) module to explicitly decompose paired input data into modality-specific and modality-shared representations, thereby reducing redundancy between modalities. Furthermore, the disentangled representations are further refined then updated through a novel training regularization strategy that imposes constraints on distributional similarity, difference, and representativeness of modality features. Finally, the augmented multimodal features are integrated into a joint representation via proposed Deep Holistic Orthogonal Fusion (DHOF) strategy. Extensive experiments conducted on six TCGA cancer cohorts demonstrate that our MurreNet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in survival prediction.
@article{arxiv.2507.04891,
title = {MurreNet: Modeling Holistic Multimodal Interactions Between Histopathology and Genomic Profiles for Survival Prediction},
author = {Mingxin Liu and Chengfei Cai and Jun Li and Pengbo Xu and Jinze Li and Jiquan Ma and Jun Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.04891},
year = {2025}
}