Work

An interpretable multimodal morphomolecular model refines progression-risk stratification in early-stage endometrioid endometrial carcinoma

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Background: Risk stratification remains incomplete for patients with FIGO stage I-II endometrioid endometrial carcinoma (EEC) despite clinicopathological assessment and molecular subtyping. Interpretable integration of diagnostic tissue morphology with molecular programmes may provide complementary information for progression-risk assessment. Methods: We developed a prototype-resolved interpretable survival model (PRISM), a multimodal framework integrating haematoxylin and eosin-stained whole-slide images with RNA-seq-derived pathway programmes for progression-free survival risk assessment. PRISM was developed in 287 eligible TCGA-UCEC patients with EEC, comprising a training cohort (n = 229) and a held-out internal validation cohort (n = 58). After model specification was fixed, PRISM was retrained on all 287 cases and evaluated without further tuning in an independent CPTAC-UCEC cohort of 63 patients with EEC. Prototype-pathway alignment provided tissue- and pathway-level interpretation of model predictions. Results: Among 350 patients with EEC and matched multimodal data, PRISM achieved C-indices of 0.770, 0.751 and 0.745 in the TCGA training, internal validation and CPTAC external validation cohorts, respectively. In CPTAC-UCEC, the 36-month time-dependent AUC was 0.727, compared with 0.685 for the clinicopathological and molecular subtype baseline model. In a complementary fixed-horizon analysis, adding PRISM to the clinicopathological model increased the 36-month AUC in CPTAC-UCEC from 0.609 to 0.719. The PRISM risk score remained associated with progression-free survival after multivariable adjustment. Prototype-resolved analyses linked higher-risk predictions to localised histomorphological patterns and pathway programmes related to proliferation, cell-cycle activity, glycolysis, hypoxia, focal adhesion and epithelial-mesenchymal transition. Conclusion: PRISM showed prognostic discrimination in an exploratory independent external evaluation and provided a biologically interpretable framework for integrating histopathology and transcriptomics to refine progression-risk assessment in early-stage EEC. Further validation in larger, prospective, multi-institutional cohorts is warranted to establish its generalisability and clinical utility.

Source: Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology

DOI: 10.3389/fcell.2026.1945984