MedPro-DG: Domain-Aware Masked Contrastive Prompt Learning of Institution Generalization for Outcome Prediction
摘要
Accurate outcome prediction for head and neck cancer is critical but remains challenging due to domain shifts across multi-institutional imaging datasets. Existing domain generalization (DG) methods focus on visual features while overlooking clinical domain-invariant information. To address this gap, we propose MedPro-DG, a novel prompt learning framework that integrates CT imaging with clinical variables using domain-aware masked contrastive prompt learning. Our method can effectively mitigate domain shifts by aligning cross-modal features with domain-invariant clinical semantics. Extensive experiments conducted across six medical centers demonstrate the superiority of MedPro-DG, which outperforms state-of-the-art DG methods by 1.35% in AUC and 4.06% in ACC on average. Ablation studies further reveal that our prompt learning can capture clinically domain-invariant features, highlighting their diagnostic relevance. This work pioneers domain-invariant vision-language fusion for medical domain generalization, providing an available and effective solution for multi-center collaborative diagnosis.