Artificial Neural Network Prediction of Mortality in Cancer Patients Presenting for Radiation Therapy at a Multisite...

For many decades, the management of cancer has utilized radiation therapy, which continues to evolve with technology to improve patient outcomes. However, despite the standardization of treatment plans and the establishment of best clinical practices based on prospective, randomized trials and adherence to National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines, the outcomes from radiation therapy are highly variable and dependent on a number of factors, including patient demographics, tumor characteristics/histology, and treatment parameters. In this study, we attempt to use available patient data and treatment parameters at the time of radiation therapy to predict future outcomes using artificial intelligence (AI).

Six thousand five hundred ninety-five cases of patients who completed radiation treatment were selected retrospectively and used to train artificial neural networks (ANNs) and baseline models (i.e., logistic regression, random forest, support vector machines [SVMs], gradient boosting [XGBoost]) for binary classification of mortality at multiple time points ranging from six months to five years post-treatment. A hyperparameter grid search was used to identify the optimal network architecture for each time point, using sensitivity as the primary outcome metric.

The median age was 75 years (range: 2-102 years). There were 63.8% females and 36.1% males. The results indicate that ANNs were able to successfully perform binary mortality prediction with an accuracy greater than random chance and greater sensitivity than baseline models used. The best-performing algorithm was the ANN, which achieved a sensitivity of 83.00% ± 4.89% for five-year mortality.

The neural network was able to achieve higher sensitivity than Logistic Regression, SVM Random Forest, and XGBoost across all output target variables, demonstrating the utility of a neural network model for mortality prediction on the provided dataset.