Papers › Towards Explainable End-to-End Prostate Cancer Relapse Prediction from H&E Images...
Towards Explainable End-to-End Prostate Cancer Relapse Prediction from H&E Images Combining Self-Attention Multiple Instance Learning with a Recurrent Neural Network
Esther Dietrich, Patrick Fuhlert, Anne Ernst, Guido Sauter, Maximilian Lennartz, H. Siegfried Stiehl, Marina Zimmermann, Stefan Bonn
Clinical decision support for histopathology image data mainly focuses on strongly supervised annotations, which offers intuitive interpretability, but is bound by expert performance. Here, we propose an explainable cancer relapse prediction network (eCaReNet) and show that end-to-end learning without strong annotations offers state-of-the-art performance while interpretability can be included through an attention mechanism. On the use case of prostate cancer survival prediction, using 14,479 images and only relapse times as annotations, we reach a cumulative dynamic AUC of 0.78 on a validation set, being on par with an expert pathologist (and an AUC of 0.77 on a separate test set). Our model is well-calibrated and outputs survival curves as well as a risk score and group per patient. Making use of the attention weights of a multiple instance learning layer, we show that malignant patches have a higher influence on the prediction than benign patches, thus offering an intuitive interpretation of the prediction. Our code is available at www.github.com/imsb-uke/ecarenet.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections