Predicting Metastatic Risk from Primary Cancer Tissue Architecture via Distance-Aware Spatial Modeling

Abstract

Predicting distant metastasis from the digital H&E slides of the primary tumor is a critical yet challenging task in computational pathology. Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) approaches can attend to subdomains in whole slide images (WSIs) that harbor features of pre-metastatic cancer regions. However, conventional MIL models largely treat tissue patches as unordered bags, discarding the spatial layout that defines how these regions are arranged and interact across the tissue. We propose that metastatic risk is shaped not only by local patch appearance, but also by the geometric organization of patches in the WSI and the interaction between the tissue compartments. To this end, we introduce Distance-aware Tissue Modeling for Multiple Instance Learning (DTMF-MIL), a spatial MIL framework that reinforces feature embeddings with explicit distance priors. By computing signed distance functions (SDFs) to capture regions with similar features, and representing each patch with radial-basis distance responses and local SDF statistics, DTMF-MIL learns positions of patches with respect to regional interiors and boundaries. The interactions between similar patches are contextualized across local tissue neighborhoods and used to guide slide-level attention while pooling patch feature evidence for metastasis prediction. We evaluate DTMF-MIL for prediction of distant prostate cancer metastasis in an internal prostate needle-biopsy cohort (IPC) from a large hospital system and on public TCGA-COAD and TCGA-KIRC datasets across multiple pathology foundation-model backbones. Across most dataset, backbone, and metric combinations, DTMF-MIL achieves the strongest results consistently.