Modelling interpretable patient-level representationsfrom structured and simple multimodal data

Authors

Oksza-Orzechowski, K., Lazecka, M., Koperski, L., Wojtowicz, D., Mozejko, M., Schulz, D., Liechti, R., Marzetta, F., Morfouace, M., Hong, H. S., Tissot, S., Bodenmiller, B., Staub, E., Szczurek, E.

Abstract

Patient cohort profiling increasingly includes structured views for multiple modalities, such as single-cell RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics or proteomics, and histology, each providing multiple subobservations per patient, including single cells, spatial spots or patches. To model such data along with simple patient-level views, current multimodal integration methods typically rely on separately precomputed summaries and fail to fully leverage information in structured views. Here we present FACTMx, a variational framework that jointly models structured and simple views to learn interpretable patient-level representations. FACTMx couples latent patient factors with subobservation clustering and per-patient component proportions, enabling direct interpretation and downstream association analyses. The framework supports different structured-view mixture assumptions, including topic- and Gaussian-structured data, while retaining modular encoder-decoder parameterisations. In simulations spanning sparse and dense dependencies and multiple noise regimes, FACTMx improved reconstruction, integration and recovery of structured components relative to previous methods. Applied to non-small cell lung cancer cohorts, FACTMx captured survival-associated latent signals linked to immune microenvironments, gene expression pathways and spatially coherent histological patterns. In a longitudinal coronary syndrome cohort, FACTMx highlighted an outcome-associated axis connected to ejection-fraction change, immune cell states, soluble mediators and cardiac injury markers. These results support joint structured-simple modelling for interpretable multimodal patient stratification.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 05 Sep 2026.

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