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Clinical Trial
. 2018 Dec 31;13(12):e0208808.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0208808. eCollection 2018.

Learning from data to predict future symptoms of oncology patients

Nikolaos Papachristou  1 , Daniel Puschmann  1 , Payam Barnaghi  1 , Bruce Cooper  2 , Xiao Hu  2 , Roma Maguire  3 , Kathi Apostolidis  4 , Yvette P Conley  5 , Marilyn Hammer  6 , Stylianos Katsaragakis  7 , Kord M Kober  2 , Jon D Levine  2 , Lisa McCann  3 , Elisabeth Patiraki  8 , Eileen P Furlong  9 , Patricia A Fox  9 , Steven M Paul  2 , Emma Ream  1 , Fay Wright  10 , Christine Miaskowski  2
Affiliations
Clinical Trial

Learning from data to predict future symptoms of oncology patients

Nikolaos Papachristou et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Effective symptom management is a critical component of cancer treatment. Computational tools that predict the course and severity of these symptoms have the potential to assist oncology clinicians to personalize the patient's treatment regimen more efficiently and provide more aggressive and timely interventions. Three common and inter-related symptoms in cancer patients are depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbance. In this paper, we elaborate on the efficiency of Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Non-linear Canonical Correlation Analysis by Neural Networks (n-CCA) to predict the severity of the aforementioned symptoms between two different time points during a cycle of chemotherapy (CTX). Our results demonstrate that these two methods produced equivalent results for all three symptoms. These types of predictive models can be used to identify high risk patients, educate patients about their symptom experience, and improve the timing of pre-emptive and personalized symptom management interventions.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Overview of our analytic approach to learn from data to predict future symptoms of oncology patients.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Multiple imputation.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Support Vector Regression.
Fig 4
Fig 4. n-CCA training and validation: (i) training of the n-CCA model, (ii) validation of the n-CCA model.
Fig 5
Fig 5. Bland—Atman plot of the SVR model with the polynomial function and the n-CCA model on the dataset with Maximum Likelihood imputation.
Fig 6
Fig 6. Missing values pattern (Little’s MCAR test, p>0.05).
Fig 7
Fig 7. Correlation analysis of predictor variables.
Fig 8
Fig 8. Density plots of the sleep disturbance (GSDS), anxiety (STAI-S) and depression (CES-D) real values compared to the density plots of predicted values with the SVR (polynomial kernel) and n-CCA on the dataset with the Maximum Likelihood Estimation imputation.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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