Predicting Dynamic Clinical Outcomes of the Chemotherapy for Canine Lymphoma Patients Using a Machine Learning Model

First-line treatments of cancer do not always work, and even when they do, they cure the disease at unequal rates mostly owing to biological and clinical heterogeneity across patients. Accurate prediction of clinical outcome and survival following the treatment can support and expedite the process of comparing alternative treatments. We describe the methodology to dynamically determine remission probabilities for individual patients, as well as their prospects of progression-free survival (PFS). The proposed methodology utilizes the ex vivo drug sensitivity of cancer cells, their immunophenotyping results, and patient information, such as age and breed, in training machine learning (ML) models, as well as the Cox hazards model to predict the probability of clinical remission (CR) or relapse across time for a given patient. We applied the methodology using the three types of data obtained from 242 canine lymphoma patients treated by (L)-CHOP chemotherapy. The results demonstrate substantial enhancement in the predictive accuracy of the ML models by utilizing features from all the three types of data. They also highlight superior performance and utility in predicting survival compared to the conventional stratification method. We believe that the proposed methodology can contribute to improving and personalizing the care of cancer patients.