SurvNet: A Novel Deep Neural Network for Lung Cancer Survival Analysis With Missing Values

Survival analysis is important for guiding further treatment and improving lung cancer prognosis. It is a challenging task because of the poor distinguishability of features and the missing values in practice. A novel multi-task based neural network, SurvNet, is proposed in this paper. The proposed SurvNet model is trained in a multi-task learning framework to jointly learn across three related tasks: input reconstruction, survival classification, and Cox regression. It uses an input reconstruction mechanism cooperating with incomplete-aware reconstruction loss for latent feature learning of incomplete data with missing values. Besides, the SurvNet model introduces a context gating mechanism to bridge the gap between survival classification and Cox regression. A new real-world dataset of 1,137 patients with IB-IIA stage non-small cell lung cancer is collected to evaluate the performance of the SurvNet model. The proposed SurvNet achieves a higher concordance index than the traditional Cox model and Cox-Net. The difference between high-risk and low-risk groups obtained by SurvNet is more significant than that of high-risk and low-risk groups obtained by the other models. Moreover, the SurvNet outperforms the other models even though the input data is randomly cropped and it achieves better generalization performance on the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program (SEER) dataset.

Automated summary

The proposed SurvNet model, trained in a multi-task learning framework, effectively handles missing values and complex features. It outperforms traditional Cox models and Cox-Net models, showing superior performance on real-world datasets.