AI model identifies individuals at highest risk for up to three years before pancreatic cancer diagnosis based only on medical records

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"At a glance:

An AI tool identified people at the highest risk for pancreatic cancer up to three years before actual diagnosis.

The findings point to the promise of AI for mass screening to help expedite the diagnosis of an aggressive disease often identified with serious delays.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers in the world and its toll is projected to increase. ...
An artificial intelligence tool has successfully identified people at the highest risk for pancreatic cancer up to three years before diagnosis using solely the patients’ medical records ..."

From the abstract:

"Pancreatic cancer is an aggressive disease that typically presents late with poor outcomes ... In this study, we applied artificial intelligence methods to clinical data from 6 million patients (24,000 pancreatic cancer cases) in Denmark (Danish National Patient Registry (DNPR)) and from 3 million patients (3,900 cases) in the United States (US Veterans Affairs (US-VA)). We trained machine learning models on the sequence of disease codes in clinical histories and tested prediction of cancer occurrence within incremental time windows (CancerRiskNet). For cancer occurrence within 36 months, the performance of the best DNPR model has area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve = 0.88 and decreases to AUROC (3m) = 0.83 when disease events within 3 months before cancer diagnosis are excluded from training, with an estimated relative risk of 59 for 1,000 highest-risk patients older than age 50 years. Cross-application of the Danish model to US-VA data had lower performance (AUROC = 0.71), and retraining was needed to improve performance (AUROC = 0.78, AUROC (3m) = 0.76). These results improve the ability to design realistic surveillance programs for patients at elevated risk ..."

AI Predicts Future Pancreatic Cancer | Harvard Medical School AI model spots those at highest risk for up to three years before diagnosis

A deep learning algorithm to predict risk of pancreatic cancer from disease trajectories (open access)

Fig. 1: Training and prediction of pancreatic cancer risk from disease trajectories.