journal article·2026-01Open access

Predicting MammaPrint Recurrence Risk from Breast Cancer Pathological Images Using a Weakly Supervised Transformer

Chaoyang Yan, Linwei Li, Xiaolong Qian, Yang Ou, Zhidong Huang, Zhihan Ruan, Wenting Xiang, Hong Liu, Jian Liu

Advanced Science· Volume 13· Issue 4

Abstract

Abstract Recurrence related to poor prognosis is a leading cause of mortality in patients with breast cancer (BC). The MammaPrint (MP) genomic assay is designed to stratify recurrence risk and evaluate chemotherapy benefits for early‐stage HR+/HER2‐ BC patients. However, MP fails to reveal spatial tumor morphology and is limited by high costs. In this study, a BC MP cohort is established and CPMP is developed, a weakly supervised agent‐attention transformer model, to predict MP recurrence risk from annotation‐free BC histopathological slides. CPMP achieves an AUROC of 0.824 ± 0.03 in predicting MP risk groups. CPMP is further leveraged for spatial and morphological analyses to explore histological patterns associated with MP risk groups. The model reveals tumor spatial localization at the whole‐slide level and highlights distinct intercellular interaction patterns of MP groups. It also characterizes the diversity in tumor morphology and uncovers MP high‐specific, low‐specific, and colocalized morphological phenotypes that differ in quantitative cellular composition. Prognostic evaluation in the external cohort exhibits significant stratification of distant metastasis risk (HR: 3.14, p ‐value = 0.0014), underscoring the prognostic power of CPMP. These findings demonstrate the capability of CPMP in MP risk prediction, offering a flexible supplement to genomic risk assessment in early‐stage BC.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: AI in cancer detection · Breast Cancer Treatment Studies · Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Centre for Bioinformatics and Intelligent Medicine College of Computer Science Nankai University Tianjin 300350 China

The Second Surgical Department of Breast Cancer Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute & Hospital National Clinical Research Center for Cancer Tianjin 300060 China

Tianjin's Clinical Research Center for Cancer Tianjin 300060 China

Key Laboratory of Breast Cancer Prevention and Therapy Tianjin Medical University Ministry of Education Tianjin 300060 China

Department of Breast Pathology and Lab Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute & Hospital National Clinical Research Center for Cancer Tianjin 300060 China

State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology College of Computer Science Nankai University Tianjin 300350 China

Funding

National Key Research and Development Program of China · National Natural Science Foundation of China

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