# Radiomics-enhanced Deep Multi-task Learning for Outcome Prediction in Head and Neck Cancer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.05409 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05409/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [DeepSurv: Personalized Treatment Recommender System Using A Cox Proportional Hazards Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00931/) (2016)
- [Radiomics strategies for risk assessment of tumour failure in head-and-neck cancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08516/) (2017)
- [An Ensemble Approach for Patient Prognosis of Head and Neck Tumor Using Multimodal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12537/) (2022)
- [DeepMTS: Deep Multi-task Learning for Survival Prediction in Patients with Advanced Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma using Pretreatment PET/CT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07711/) (2021)
- [Prediction of 5-year Progression-Free Survival in Advanced Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma with Pretreatment PET/CT using Multi-Modality Deep Learning-based Radiomics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05220/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Merging-Diverging Hybrid Transformer Networks for Survival Prediction in Head and Neck Cancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03427/) (2023)
- [Full-resolution MLPs Empower Medical Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16707/) (2023)
- [AdaMSS: Adaptive Multi-Modality Segmentation-to-Survival Learning for Survival Outcome Prediction from PET/CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09946/) (2023)
- [Toward Next-generation Medical Vision Backbones: Modeling Finer-grained Long-range Visual Dependency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11328/) (2025)
- [DuPLUS: Dual-Prompt Vision-Language Framework for Universal Medical Image Segmentation and Prognosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03483/) (2025)
- [AMO-ENE: Attention-based Multi-Omics Fusion Model for Outcome Prediction in Extra Nodal Extension and HPV-associated Oropharyngeal Cancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09280/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Outcome prediction is crucial for head and neck cancer patients as it can provide prognostic information for early treatment planning. Radiomics methods have been widely used for outcome prediction from medical images. However, these methods are limited by their reliance on intractable manual segmentation of tumor regions. Recently, deep learning methods have been proposed to perform end-to-end outcome prediction so as to remove the reliance on manual segmentation. Unfortunately, without segmentation masks, these methods will take the whole image as input, such that makes them difficult to focus on tumor regions and potentially unable to fully leverage the prognostic information within the tumor regions. In this study, we propose a radiomics-enhanced deep multi-task framework for outcome prediction from PET/CT images, in the context of HEad and neCK TumOR segmentation and outcome prediction challenge (HECKTOR 2022). In our framework, our novelty is to incorporate radiomics as an enhancement to our recently proposed Deep Multi-task Survival model (DeepMTS). The DeepMTS jointly learns to predict the survival risk scores of patients and the segmentation masks of tumor regions. Radiomics features are extracted from the predicted tumor regions and combined with the predicted survival risk scores for final outcome prediction, through which the prognostic information in tumor regions can be further leveraged. Our method achieved a C-index of 0.681 on the testing set, placing the 2nd on the leaderboard with only 0.00068 lower in C-index than the 1st place.