Deep learning-based survival prediction of oral cancer patients

Abstract

The Cox proportional hazards model commonly used to evaluate prognostic variables in survival of cancer patients may be too simplistic to properly predict a cancer patient’s outcome since it assumes that the outcome is a linear combination of covariates. In this retrospective study including 255 patients suitable for analysis who underwent surgical treatment in our department from 2000 to 2017, we applied a deep learning-based survival prediction method in oral squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) patients and validated its performance. Survival prediction using DeepSurv, a deep learning based-survival prediction algorithm, was compared with random survival forest (RSF) and the Cox proportional hazard model (CPH). DeepSurv showed the best performance among the three models, the c-index of the training and testing sets reaching 0.810 and 0.781, respectively, followed by RSF (0.770/0.764), and CPH (0.756/0.694). The performance of DeepSurv steadily improved with added features. Thus, deep learning-based survival prediction may improve prediction accuracy and guide clinicians both in choosing treatment options for better survival and in avoiding unnecessary treatments.