A principled machine learning framework improves accuracy of stage II colorectal cancer prognosis.

Journal: NPJ digital medicine
Published Date:

Abstract

Accurate prognosis is fundamental in planning an appropriate therapy for cancer patients. Consequent to the heterogeneity of the disease, intra- and inter-pathologist variability, and the inherent limitations of current pathological reporting systems, patient outcome varies considerably within similarly staged patient cohorts. This is particularly true when classifying stage II colorectal cancer patients using the current TNM guidelines. The aim of the present work is to address this problem through the use of machine learning. In particular, we introduce a data driven framework which makes use of a large number of diverse types of features, readily collected from immunofluorescence imagery. Its outstanding performance in predicting mortality in stage II patients (AUROC = 0:94), exceeds that of current clinical guidelines such as pT stage (AUROC = 0:65), and is demonstrated on a cohort of 173 colorectal cancer patients.

Authors

  • Neofytos Dimitriou
    1School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, KY16 9SX UK.
  • Ognjen Arandjelović
    1School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, KY16 9SX UK.
  • David J Harrison
    2School of Medicine, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, KY16 9TF UK.
  • Peter D Caie
    2School of Medicine, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, KY16 9TF UK.

Keywords

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