Early Detection of Bladder Cancer Using Advanced Feature Engineering and Swarm Intelligence Optimization on EHRs

Bladder cancer (BC) symptoms often overlap with benign conditions, while no routine screening exists for general population. We aim to develop a machine learning (ML)-based screening pipeline for early BC detection using electronic-health-records (EHRs) in primary care.

A multi-centred case-control cohort (1995-2018; n = 64,884) was created for model training and testing. We further validated the model prospectively on an independent cohort (2019-2020; n = 4,569). We proposed the Parsimony driven REweighting for Calibrated Input-based Screening for Early detection-Adjustable Grey Zone (PRECISE-AGZ), which identified influential features from 48,261 candidates and developed a calibrated logistic regression screening model with optimised grey-zone thresholds.

We finally identified 38 features, achieving an AUC (area under the curve) of 0.789 (95% CI: 0.780-0.798) on testing set. Neurological disorders (e.g., Parkinson's disease, OR: 0.86, 95% CI: 0.79-0.92) and medications (e.g., Tamoxifen, OR: 1.13, 95% CI: 1.07-1.20) emerged as novel predictors for BC screening. The screening model stratified the population into three risk categories based on predicted probability: low-risk (0.55), achieving a sensitivity of 0.852, F1-score of 0.799, and screening population coverage (SPC) of 34.5%. Applied to the prospective validation cohort, model performance varied by months before BC diagnosis, with sensitivities ranging from 0.872 (F1-score: 0.714, SPC: 29.9%) at the first month to 0.667 (F1-score: 0.690, SPC: 12.7%) at the twelfth month.

The PRECISE-AGZ pipeline efficiently identified clinical signals from EHRs for early BC detection, offering promising potential for implementing population-based BC screening.