Machine Learning Survival Models for Relapse Prediction in a Early Stage Lung Cancer Patient.

Lung cancer is one of the leading health complications causing high mortality worldwide. The relapsing behavior of medically treated early-stage lung cancer makes this disease even more complicated. Thus predicting such relapse using a data-centric approach provides a complementary perspective for clinicians to understand the disease. In this preliminary work, we explored off-the-shelf survival models to predict the relapse of early-stage lung cancer patients. We analyzed the survival models on a cohort of 1348 early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients in different timestamps. Using the prediction explanation model SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), we further explained the best-performing survival model's predictions. Our explainable predictive model is a potential tool for oncologists that address an unmet clinical need for post-treatment patient stratification based on the relapse hazard.