# Survival Modeling from Whole Slide Images via Patch-Level Graph Clustering and Mixture Density Experts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16476 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16476/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Data Efficient and Weakly Supervised Computational Pathology on Whole Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09666/) (2020)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01332/) (2020)
- [TransMIL: Transformer based Correlated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00908/) (2021)
- [Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08939/) (2020)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to Gigapixel Images via Hierarchical Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02647/) (2022)
- [Whole Slide Images based Cancer Survival Prediction using Attention Guided Deep Multiple Instance Learning Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11169/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Self-Supervised Learning on Diverse Pathology Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04690/) (2022)
- [Whole Slide Images are 2D Point Clouds: Context-Aware Survival Prediction using Patch-based Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13048/) (2021)
- [Machine Learning for Survival Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04649/) (2017)
- [Survival Mixture Density Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10759/) (2022)
- [SCMIL: Sparse Context-aware Multiple Instance Learning for Predicting Cancer Survival Probability Distribution in Whole Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00664/) (2024)
- [PathoGen-X: A Cross-Modal Genomic Feature Trans-Align Network for Enhanced Survival Prediction from Histopathology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00749/) (2024)
- [CoC: Chain-of-Cancer based on Cross-Modal Autoregressive Traction for Survival Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15696/) (2025)
- [HiLa: Hierarchical Vision-Language Collaboration for Cancer Survival Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04613/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a modular framework for predicting cancer specific survival directly from whole slide pathology images (WSIs). The framework consists of four key stages designed to capture prognostic and morphological heterogeneity. First, a Quantile Based Patch Filtering module selects prognostically informative tissue regions through quantile thresholding. Second, Graph Regularized Patch Clustering models phenotype level variations using a k nearest neighbor graph that enforces spatial and morphological coherence. Third, Hierarchical Feature Aggregation learns both intra and inter cluster dependencies to represent multiscale tumor organization. Finally, an Expert Guided Mixture Density Model estimates complex survival distributions via Gaussian mixtures, enabling fine grained risk prediction. Evaluated on TCGA LUAD, TCGA KIRC, and TCGA BRCA cohorts, our model achieves concordance indices of 0.653 ,0.719 ,and 0.733 respectively, surpassing existing state of the art approaches in survival prediction from WSIs.