Patient-Level Cancer Prediction Models From a Nationwide Patient Cohort: Model Development and Validation

Nationwide population-based cohorts provide a new opportunity to build automated risk prediction models at the patient level, and claim data are one of the more useful resources to this end. To avoid unnecessary diagnostic intervention after cancer screening tests, patient-level prediction models should be developed.

We aimed to develop cancer prediction models using nationwide claim databases with machine learning algorithms, which are explainable and easily applicable in real-world environments.

As source data, we used the Korean National Insurance System Database. Every Korean in ≥40 years old undergoes a national health checkup every 2 years. We gathered all variables from the database including demographic information, basic laboratory values, anthropometric values, and previous medical history. We applied conventional logistic regression methods, light gradient boosting methods, neural networks, survival analysis, and one-class embedding classifier methods to effectively analyze high dimension data based on deep learning-based anomaly detection. Performance was measured with area under the curve and area under precision recall curve. We validated our models externally with a health checkup database from a tertiary hospital.

The one-class embedding classifier model received the highest area under the curve scores with values of 0.868, 0.849, 0.798, 0.746, 0.800, 0.749, and 0.790 for liver, lung, colorectal, pancreatic, gastric, breast, and cervical cancers, respectively. For area under precision recall curve, the light gradient boosting models had the highest score with values of 0.383, 0.401, 0.387, 0.300, 0.385, 0.357, and 0.296 for liver, lung, colorectal, pancreatic, gastric, breast, and cervical cancers, respectively.

Our results show that it is possible to easily develop applicable cancer prediction models with nationwide claim data using machine learning. The 7 models showed acceptable performances and explainability, and thus can be distributed easily in real-world environments.