# Research on a method for early diagnosis and progression prediction of cervical cancer based on imaging omics and molecular omics

**Authors:** Fengdan Sun, Xian Ge, Luohui Deng, Yeman Wang, Hongbo Wu, Ling Wang, Qingling Ren

PMC · DOI: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1670852 · Frontiers in Oncology · 2026-02-10

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a new AI framework that combines imaging and molecular data to improve early cervical cancer diagnosis and predict disease progression.

## Contribution

A novel transformer-based framework, CervixFormer, with domain-aware calibration for reliable and interpretable multimodal cancer diagnostics.

## Key findings

- CervixFormer outperforms traditional models in diagnostic accuracy and robustness on imbalanced clinical datasets.
- The framework effectively handles uncertainty and improves calibration reliability in multimodal cancer prediction.
- Integration of clinical priors enhances the alignment between predicted confidence and true diagnostic risk.

## Abstract

In response to the increasing demand for clinically interpretable and reliable diagnostic tools in medical informatics, this study introduces a novel computational framework for the early diagnosis and progression prediction of complex diseases, grounded in the integration of imaging omics and molecular omics. Aligning with the research scope of advanced data-driven solutions in computer science for healthcare applications, this work targets key challenges in multimodal biomedical data analysis, including feature heterogeneity, data imbalance, and diagnostic uncertainty. Traditional diagnostic models, often relying on single-modal data or shallow machine learning methods, struggle to capture non-linear dependencies across heterogeneous feature spaces and lack reliable uncertainty quantification for clinical decision-making, resulting in limited generalization and interpretability on real-world, imbalanced clinical datasets.

To address these limitations, we propose a transformer-based diagnostic encoder, CervixFormer, coupled with a Domain-Aware Calibration Strategy (DACS). CervixFormer leverages hierarchical attention mechanisms and cross-modality feature fusion to extract comprehensive diagnostic representations from high-dimensional imaging and omics data. The framework incorporates imbalance-aware embedding layers and stochastic uncertainty modeling to enhance robustness against noisy and unevenly distributed samples. Furthermore, DACS introduces domain-guided probabilistic recalibration by integrating clinical priors and uncertainty estimates, optimizing the alignment between predicted confidence and true diagnostic risk.

Extensive experiments conducted on large-scale multimodal datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms conventional machine learning and deep learning baselines in terms of diagnostic accuracy, robustness, and calibration reliability. The results indicate substantial improvements in handling data imbalance and uncertainty, while maintaining strong predictive performance across heterogeneous modalities. These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining transformer-based multimodal representation learning with domain-aware uncertainty calibration for clinical diagnostics. The proposed framework not only enhances predictive accuracy but also improves confidence reliability and interpretability, which are critical for real-world clinical decision support. Overall, this study underscores the potential of advanced multimodal learning architectures to advance data-driven healthcare applications and provides a promising direction for reliable and clinically applicable diagnostic systems.

## Linked entities

- **Diseases:** cervical cancer (MONDO:0002974)

## Full-text entities

- **Genes:** MIR21 (microRNA 21) [NCBI Gene 406991] {aka MIRN21, hsa-mir-21, miR-21, miRNA21}, PIK3CA (phosphatidylinositol-4,5-bisphosphate 3-kinase catalytic subunit alpha) [NCBI Gene 5290] {aka CCM4, CLAPO, CLOVE, CWS5, HMH, MCAP}, VEGFA (vascular endothelial growth factor A) [NCBI Gene 7422] {aka L-VEGF, MVCD1, VEGF, VPF}, TP53 (tumor protein p53) [NCBI Gene 7157] {aka BCC7, BMFS5, LFS1, P53, TRP53}, PTEN (phosphatase and tensin homolog) [NCBI Gene 5728] {aka 10q23del, BZS, CWS1, DEC, GLM2, MHAM}, DAPK1 (death associated protein kinase 1) [NCBI Gene 1612] {aka DAPK, ROCO3}, RARB (retinoic acid receptor beta) [NCBI Gene 5915] {aka HAP, MCOPS12, NR1B2, RARbeta, RARbeta1, RRB2}, MMP9 (matrix metallopeptidase 9) [NCBI Gene 4318] {aka CLG4B, GELB, MANDP2, MMP-9}, MIR34A (microRNA 34a) [NCBI Gene 407040] {aka MIRN34A, miRNA34A, mir-34, mir-34a}, EP300 (EP300 lysine acetyltransferase) [NCBI Gene 2033] {aka KAT3B, MKHK2, RSTS2, p300}
- **Diseases:** lesion (MESH:D009059), cervical disease (MESH:D002575), HPV infection (MESH:D030361), necrotic (MESH:D009336), precancerous lesions (MESH:D011230), Cervical cancer (MESH:D002583), pain (MESH:D010146), inflammation (MESH:D007249), metastasis (MESH:D009362), cancer (MESH:D009369)
- **Chemicals:** Pap (MESH:D010724), CervixFormer (-), choline (MESH:D002794)
- **Species:** Homo sapiens (human, species) [taxon 9606]

## Full text

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## Figures

4 figures with captions in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12929100/full.md

## References

37 references — full list in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12929100/full.md

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12929100