Predicting Efficacy of Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors in Targeted Oncology Therapy using Multi-Modal Deep Learning

Abstract

The advent of immune checkpoint inhibitors has revolutionized the landscape of oncological treatment, particularly for solid tumors such as melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer. However, the efficacy of these therapies remains heterogeneous, with a significant fraction of patients failing to exhibit a durable objective response. Traditional biomarkers, including PD-L1 expression levels and tumor mutational burden, lack the requisite sensitivity and specificity to accurately stratify patients in a clinical setting. This paper proposes a comprehensive multi-modal deep learning framework designed to predict the therapeutic efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors by integrating whole slide histopathology images, genomic sequencing data, and baseline clinical demographics. By employing a late-fusion architecture that utilizes attention mechanisms to weigh the relative importance of distinct modalities, the proposed model captures the complex non-linear interactions between the tumor microenvironment and the host immune system. Experimental results on a large-scale retrospective cohort demonstrate that this multi-modal approach significantly outperforms unimodal baselines and current standard-of-care biomarkers. The study provides a pathway toward precision immuno-oncology, highlighting the critical role of artificial intelligence in deciphering the biological heterogeneity of cancer response mechanisms.