Multimodal deep learning to predict prognosis in adult and pediatric brain tumors

Background The introduction of deep learning in both imaging and genomics has significantly advanced the analysis of biomedical data. For complex diseases such as cancer, different data modalities may reveal different disease characteristics, and the integration of imaging with genomic data has the potential to unravel additional information than when using these data sources in isolation. Here, we propose a DL framework that combines these two modalities with the aim to predict brain tumor prognosis. Methods Using two separate glioma cohorts of 783 adults and 305 pediatric patients we developed a DL framework that can fuse histopathology images with gene expression profiles. Three strategies for data fusion were implemented and compared: early, late, and joint fusion. Additional validation of the adult glioma models was done on an independent cohort of 97 adult patients. Results Here we show that the developed multimodal data models achieve better prediction results compared to the single data models, but also lead to the identification of more relevant biological pathways. When testing our adult models on a third brain tumor dataset, we show our multimodal framework is able to generalize and performs better on new data from different cohorts. Leveraging the concept of transfer learning, we demonstrate how our pediatric multimodal models can be used to predict prognosis for two more rare (less available samples) pediatric brain tumors. Conclusions Our study illustrates that a multimodal data fusion approach can be successfully implemented and customized to model clinical outcome of adult and pediatric brain tumors.