# IPGPhormer: Interpretable Pathology Graph-Transformer for Survival Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12381 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12381/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [Data Efficient and Weakly Supervised Computational Pathology on Whole Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09666/) (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)
- [HoVer-Net: Simultaneous Segmentation and Classification of Nuclei in Multi-Tissue Histology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06499/) (2018)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to Gigapixel Images via Hierarchical Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02647/) (2022)
- [Generative Causal Explanations for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06643/) (2021)
- [Whole Slide Images are 2D Point Clouds: Context-Aware Survival Prediction using Patch-based Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13048/) (2021)
- [A graph-transformer for whole slide image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09671/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Graph Representation with Knowledge-aware Attention for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07719/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Graph Representations in Digital Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11057/) (2021)
- [SurvTRACE: Transformers for Survival Analysis with Competing Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00855/) (2021)
- [SI-MIL: Taming Deep MIL for Self-Interpretability in Gigapixel Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15010/) (2023)
- [AdvMIL: Adversarial Multiple Instance Learning for the Survival Analysis on Whole-Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06515/) (2022)
- [SLAB: Efficient Transformers with Simplified Linear Attention and Progressive Re-parameterized Batch Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11582/) (2024)
- [Cross-scale Multi-instance Learning for Pathological Image Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00216/) (2023)
- [GRASP: GRAph-Structured Pyramidal Whole Slide Image Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03592/) (2024)

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

- [PathFLIP: Fine-grained Language-Image Pretraining for Versatile Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17621/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pathological images play an essential role in cancer prognosis, while survival analysis, which integrates computational techniques, can predict critical clinical events such as patient mortality or disease recurrence from whole-slide images (WSIs). Recent advancements in multiple instance learning have significantly improved the efficiency of survival analysis. However, existing methods often struggle to balance the modeling of long-range spatial relationships with local contextual dependencies and typically lack inherent interpretability, limiting their clinical utility. To address these challenges, we propose the Interpretable Pathology Graph-Transformer (IPGPhormer), a novel framework that captures the characteristics of the tumor microenvironment and models their spatial dependencies across the tissue. IPGPhormer uniquely provides interpretability at both tissue and cellular levels without requiring post-hoc manual annotations, enabling detailed analyses of individual WSIs and cross-cohort assessments. Comprehensive evaluations on four public benchmark datasets demonstrate that IPGPhormer outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both predictive accuracy and interpretability. In summary, our method, IPGPhormer, offers a promising tool for cancer prognosis assessment, paving the way for more reliable and interpretable decision-support systems in pathology. The code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/IPGPhormer-6EEB.