Predicting the Survival of Cancer Patients with Multimodal Graph Neural Network

In recent years, cancer patients survival prediction holds important significance for worldwide health problems, and has gained many researchers attention in medical information communities. Cancer patients survival prediction can be seen the classification work which is a meaningful and challenging task. Nevertheless, research in this field is still limited. In this work, we design a novel Multimodal Graph Neural Network (MGNN)framework for predicting cancer survival, which explores the features of real-world multimodal data such as gene expression, copy number alteration and clinical data in a unified framework. Specifically, we first construct the bipartite graphs between patients and multimodal data to explore the inherent relation. Subsequently, the embedding of each patient on different bipartite graphs is obtained with graph neural network. Finally, a multimodal fusion neural layer is proposed to fuse the medical features from different modality data. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted on real-world datasets, which demonstrate the superiority of our modal with significant improvements against state-of-the-arts. Furthermore, the proposed MGNN is validated to be more robust on other four cancer datasets.