Cross-Cancer Knowledge Transfer in WSI-based Prognosis Prediction

Whole-Slide Image (WSI) is an important tool for estimating cancer prognosis. Current studies generally follow a conventional cancer-specific paradigm in which each cancer corresponds to a single model. However, this paradigm naturally struggles to scale to rare tumors and cannot leverage knowledge from other cancers. While multi-task learning frameworks have been explored recently, they often place high demands on computational resources and require extensive training on ultra-large, multi-cancer WSI datasets. To this end, this paper shifts the paradigm to knowledge transfer and presents the first preliminary yet systematic study on cross-cancer prognosis knowledge transfer in WSIs, called CROPKT. It comprises three major parts. (1) We curate a large dataset (UNI2-h-DSS) with 26 cancers and use it to measure the transferability of WSI-based prognostic knowledge across different cancers (including rare tumors). (2) Beyond a simple evaluation merely for benchmarking, we design a range of experiments to gain deeper insights into the underlying mechanism behind transferability. (3) We further show the utility of cross-cancer knowledge transfer, by proposing a routing-based baseline approach (ROUPKT) that could often efficiently utilize the knowledge transferred from off-the-shelf models of other cancers. CROPKT could serve as an inception that lays the foundation for this nascent paradigm, i.e., WSI-based prognosis prediction with cross-cancer knowledge transfer. Our source code is available at https://github.com/liupei101/CROPKT.