A disentangled representation-based multimodal fusion framework integrating pathomics and radiomics for KRAS mutation detection in colorectal cancer

Kirsten rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog (namely KRAS) is a key biomarker for prognostic analysis and targeted therapy of colorectal cancer. Recently, the advancement of machine learning, especially deep learning, has greatly promoted the development of KRAS mutation detection from tumor phenotype data, such as pathology slides or radiology images. However, there are still two major problems in existing studies: inadequate single-modal feature learning and lack of multimodal phenotypic feature fusion. In this paper, we propose a Disentangled Representation-based Multimodal Fusion framework integrating Pathomics and Radiomics (DRMF-PaRa) for KRAS mutation detection. Specifically, the DRMF-PaRa model consists of three parts: (1) the pathomics learning module, which introduces a tissue-guided Transformer model to extract more comprehensive and targeted pathological features; (2) the radiomics learning module, which captures the generic hand-crafted radiomics features and the task-specific deep radiomics features; (3) the disentangled representation-based multimodal fusion module, which learns factorized subspaces for each modality and provides a holistic view of the two heterogeneous phenotypic features. The proposed model is developed and evaluated on a multi modality dataset of 111 colorectal cancer patients with whole slide images and contrast-enhanced CT. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DRMF-PaRa model with an accuracy of 0.876 and an AUC of 0.865 for KRAS mutation detection.