# Brain Cancer Survival Prediction on Treatment-na ive MRI using Deep Anchor Attention Learning with Vision Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01857 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01857/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [Identifying the Best Machine Learning Algorithms for Brain Tumor Segmentation, Progression Assessment, and Overall Survival Prediction in the BRATS Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02629/) (2018)
- [Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08939/) (2020)
- [Transfusion: Understanding Transfer Learning for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07208/) (2019)
- [DeepSurv: Personalized Treatment Recommender System Using A Cox Proportional Hazards Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00931/) (2016)
- [Whole Slide Images based Cancer Survival Prediction using Attention Guided Deep Multiple Instance Learning Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11169/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Federated and Transfer Learning for Cancer Detection Based on Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20126/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image-based brain cancer prediction models, based on radiomics, quantify the radiologic phenotype from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, these features are difficult to reproduce because of variability in acquisition and preprocessing pipelines. Despite evidence of intra-tumor phenotypic heterogeneity, the spatial diversity between different slices within an MRI scan has been relatively unexplored using such methods. In this work, we propose a deep anchor attention aggregation strategy with a Vision Transformer to predict survival risk for brain cancer patients. A Deep Anchor Attention Learning (DAAL) algorithm is proposed to assign different weights to slice-level representations with trainable distance measurements. We evaluated our method on N = 326 MRIs. Our results outperformed attention multiple instance learning-based techniques. DAAL highlights the importance of critical slices and corroborates the clinical intuition that inter-slice spatial diversity can reflect disease severity and is implicated in outcome.