Routine laboratory trajectories encode the onset of organ-level complications in cancer

Journal: arXiv
Published Date:

Abstract

Routine laboratory panels drawn during cancer treatment constitute longitudinal physiological recordings of organ function, yet their temporal structure is discarded by single-timepoint prognostic tools. A transformer trained on 2,777,595 laboratory measurements from 3,905 patients with multiple myeloma or ovarian cancer predicted the two-year onset of 162 treatment-associated complications, including therapy-related myelodysplastic syndromes, spanning eight clinical categories, achieving 1.5- to 6.1-fold enrichment above prevalence at the group level. It matched or outperformed non-sequential baselines across grouped endpoints (AUROC gains up to +0.11), demonstrating that longitudinal laboratory trajectories capture evolving complication-specific physiology inaccessible from isolated measurements. Predictions generalised across both cancers, divergence concentrating in disease-specific complications, and biomarker masking recovered signatures consistent with established pathophysiology. External validation on MIMIC-IV and MMRF CoMMpass confirmed transferability across independent healthcare systems (AUROC up to 0.85). Routine oncological laboratory data encode organ deterioration weeks to months before clinical onset, enabling complication-specific surveillance without additional testing infrastructure.

Authors

  • Jannik Lübberstedt; Krischan Braitsch; Jacqueline Lammert; Christof Winter; Florian Gabriel; Tristan Lemke; Christopher Zirn; Markus Graf; Friedrich Puttkammer; Hartmut Häntze; Johannes Moll; Anirudh Narayanan; Andrei Zhukov; Fabian Drexel; Zeineb Ben Chaaben; Sebastian Ziegelmayer; Su Hwan Kim; Marion Högner; Jan Kirschke; Florian Bassermann; Marcus Makowski; Christian Wachinger; Lisa Adams; Keno Bressem