Multimodal time-to-event prediction often requires integrating sensitive data distributed across multiple parties, making centralized model training impractical due to privacy constraints. At the same time, most existing multimodal survival models produce single deterministic predictions without indicating how confident the model is in its estimates, which can limit their reliability in real-world decision making. To address these challenges, we propose BVFLMSP, a Bayesian Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) framework for multimodal time-to-event analysis based on a Split Neural Network architecture. In BVFLMSP, each client independently models a specific data modality using a Bayesian neural network, while a central server aggregates intermediate representations to perform survival risk prediction. To enhance privacy, we integrate differential privacy mechanisms by perturbing client side representations before transmission, providing formal privacy guarantees against information leakage during federated training. We first evaluate our Bayesian multimodal survival model against widely used single modality survival baselines and the centralized multimodal baseline MultiSurv. Across multimodal settings, the proposed method shows consistent improvements in discrimination performance, with up to 0.02 higher C-index compared to MultiSurv. We then compare federated and centralized learning under varying privacy budgets across different modality combinations, highlighting the tradeoff between predictive performance and privacy. Experimental results show that BVFLMSP effectively includes multimodal data, improves survival prediction over existing baselines, and remains robust under strict privacy constraints while providing uncertainty estimates.

In recent years, the diagnosis of gliomas has become increasingly complex. Analysis of glioma histopathology images using artificial intelligence (AI) offers new opportunities to support diagnosis and outcome prediction. To give an overview of the current state of research, this review examines 70 publicly available research studies that have proposed AI-based methods for whole-slide histopathology images of human gliomas, covering the diagnostic tasks of subtyping (16/70), grading (23/70), molecular marker prediction (13/70), and survival prediction (27/70). All studies were reviewed with regard to methodological aspects as well as clinical applicability. It was found that the focus of current research is the assessment of hematoxylin and eosin-stained tissue sections of adult-type diffuse gliomas. The majority of studies (49/70) are based on the publicly available glioblastoma and low-grade glioma datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and only a few studies employed other datasets in isolation (10/70) or in addition to the TCGA datasets (11/70). Current approaches mostly rely on convolutional neural networks (53/70) for analyzing tissue at 20x magnification (30/70). A new field of research is the integration of clinical data, omics data, or magnetic resonance imaging (27/70). So far, AI-based methods have achieved promising results, but are not yet used in real clinical settings. Future work should focus on the independent validation of methods on larger, multi-site datasets with high-quality and up-to-date clinical and molecular pathology annotations to demonstrate routine applicability.

With COVID-19 now pervasive, identification of high-risk individuals is crucial. Using data from a major healthcare provider in Southwestern Pennsylvania, we develop survival models predicting severe COVID-19 progression. In this endeavor, we face a tradeoff between more accurate models relying on many features and less accurate models relying on a few features aligned with clinician intuition. Complicating matters, many EHR features tend to be under-coded, degrading the accuracy of smaller models. In this study, we develop two sets of high-performance risk scores: (i) an unconstrained model built from all available features; and (ii) a pipeline that learns a small set of clinical concepts before training a risk predictor. Learned concepts boost performance over the corresponding features (C-index 0.858 vs. 0.844) and demonstrate improvements over (i) when evaluated out-of-sample (subsequent time periods). Our models outperform previous works (C-index 0.844-0.872 vs. 0.598-0.810).

BACKGROUND: Expanding the tumor, lymph node, metastasis (TNM) staging system by accommodating new prognostic and predictive factors for cancer will improve patient stratification and survival prediction. Here, we introduce machine learning for incorporating additional prognostic factors into the conventional TNM for stratifying patients with lung cancer and evaluating survival. METHODS: Data were extracted from SEER. A total of 77 953 patients were analyzed using factors including primary tumor (T), regional lymph node (N), distant metastasis (M), age, and histology type. Ensemble algorithm for clustering cancer data (EACCD) and C-index were applied to generate prognostic groups and expand the current staging system.

With the ever-growing complexity of primary health care system, proactive patient failure management is an effective way to enhancing the availability of health care resource. One key enabler is the dynamic prediction of time-to-event outcomes. Conventional explanatory statistical approach lacks the capability of making precise individual level prediction, while the data adaptive binary predictors does not provide nominal survival curves for biologically plausible survival analysis. The purpose of this article is to elucidate that the knowledge of explanatory survival analysis can significantly enhance the current black-box data adaptive prediction models. We apply our recently developed counterfactual dynamic survival model (CDSM) to static and longitudinal observational data and testify that the inflection point of its estimated individual survival curves provides reliable prediction of the patient failure time.