Real-World Multi-Modal and Longitudinal Lung Cancer Dataset

Abstract

Multi-modal learning has demonstrated strong potential in medical applications by integrating heterogeneous data sources such as medical imaging, clinical records, and genomics to improve predictive performance and support clinical decision-making. However, advances in this area are often constrained by two key challenges: the limited availability of well-curated, ready-to-use datasets that accurately reflect real-world conditions, where medical data are frequently collected inconsistently and are often incomplete; and the inherent difficulty of integrating heterogeneous data modalities. In this work, we introduce a newly curated multi-center, multi-modal, and longitudinal dataset designed to support the evaluation of a wide range of learning pipelines under realistic conditions. The dataset comprises a total of 1,365 lung cancer patients and has three imaging modalities (whole-slide images, CT scans, and PET scans), structured clinical data, transcriptomic, and longitudinal follow-up and treatment information. For each imaging modality the dataset contains more than one instance. Moreover, the dataset exhibits substantial and non-uniform missingness across modalities, making it well-suited for studying robust multi-modal fusion strategies. We further provide both uni-modal and multi-modal benchmarks on the task of 12-month overall survival prediction, disease-specific survival, as well as longitudinal benchmark of hazard prediction under severe missing data. Our results show that, despite high levels of missingness, integrating complementary modalities consistently improves predictive performance over uni-modal approaches, highlighting the value of multi-modal fusion in realistic clinical settings. The dataset and benchmark code are available at https://github.com/ritacmendes/MMIST-LUNG.