HONeYBEE: enabling scalable multimodal AI in oncology through foundation model-driven embeddings

Abstract Harmonized ONcologY Biomedical Embedding Encoder (HONeYBEE) is an open-source framework that integrates multimodal biomedical data for oncology applications. It processes clinical data (structured and unstructured), whole-slide images, radiology scans, and molecular profiles to generate unified patient-level embeddings using domain-specific foundation models and fusion strategies. These embeddings enable survival prediction, cancer-type classification, patient similarity retrieval, and cohort clustering. Evaluated on 11,400+ patients across 33 cancer types from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), clinical embeddings showed the strongest single-modality performance with