DeepBTS: Prediction of Recurrence-free Survival of Non-small Cell Lung Cancer Using a Time-binned Deep Neural Network

Accurate prediction of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) prognosis after surgery remains challenging. The Cox proportional hazard (PH) model is widely used, however, there are some limitations associated with it. In this study, we developed novel neural network models called binned time survival analysis (DeepBTS) models using 30 clinico-pathological features of surgically resected NSCLC patients (training cohort, n = 1,022; external validation cohort, n = 298). We employed the root-mean-square error (in the supervised learning model, s- DeepBTS) or negative log-likelihood (in the semi-unsupervised learning model, su-DeepBTS) as the loss function. The su-DeepBTS algorithm achieved better performance (C-index = 0.7306; AUC = 0.7677) than the other models (Cox PH: C-index = 0.7048 and AUC = 0.7390; s-DeepBTS: C-index = 0.7126 and AUC = 0.7420). The top 14 features were selected using su-DeepBTS model as a selector and could distinguish the low- and high-risk groups in the training cohort (p = 1.86 × 10^-11) and validation cohort (p = 1.04 × 10^-10). When trained with the optimal feature set for each model, the su-DeepBTS model could predict the prognoses of NSCLC better than the traditional model, especially in stage I patients. Follow-up studies using combined radiological, pathological imaging, and genomic data to enhance the performance of our model are ongoing.