临床研究人员和医疗AI开发者终于有了一个无需从头训练就能做生存分析的方案——用表格基础模型加一个轻量头就能超越DeepSurv，做ICU预后预测的团队可以直接在MIMIC-IV和eICU上复现。
该研究提出了一种轻量级适配方法，将表格基础模型（如TabPFN、TabDPT、TabICL）应用于临床生存分析，通过直接训练一个生存感知头（MTLR）来预测右删失的时间事件结果。在多个公开生存基准和两个大规模ICU队列（MIMIC-IV和eICU）上的评估显示，该方法在C-index指标上优于传统深度生存模型（如DeepSurv），相对提升达1.4%-1.7%。这表明预训练表格表示与生存感知目标的结合为临床生存预测提供了实用且有效的替代方案。
Tabular Foundation Models for Clinical Survival Analysis via Survival-Aware Adaptation
Predicting time-to-event outcomes such as mortality is a fundamental task in clinical decision-making, commonly addressed through survival analysis. While classical statistical and deep learning approaches have been widely studied, they typically require task-specific training and sufficient labeled data. Recent advances in tabular foundation models offer a new paradigm by learning general-purpose representations for structured data. However, their applicability to censored time-to-event prediction in clinical settings remains underexplored, as typical applications are restricted to discrete classification rather than survival analysis tasks. In this work, we propose a lightweight adaptation approach for applying tabular foundation models to clinical survival analysis by directly training a survival-aware head on top of the pretrained representations. We study representative architectures, including TabPFN, TabDPT, and TabICL, and adapt them using a multi-task logistic regression (MTLR) head to model right-censored time-to-event outcomes. We evaluate this approach on a diverse set of public survival benchmarks and two large-scale ICU cohorts, MIMIC-IV and eICU. Our results show that this transfer learning approach achieves competitive or superior performance compared to strong baselines. On MIMIC-IV, TabDPT-FT-MTLR reaches a C-index of 0.856, corresponding to a relative improvement of +1.4% over the best non-FM baseline (DeepSurv, 0.844) and +6.7% over the best zero-shot model (0.802). On eICU, TabICL-FT-MTLR achieves 0.797, yielding gains of +1.7% (DeepSurv, 0.784) and +6.4% (0.749), respectively. These findings highlight the importance of combining pretrained tabular representations with survival-aware objectives and suggest that tabular foundation models provide a practical and effective alternative for clinical survival prediction.