Learning risk models for pancreatic cancer from electronic health records

• Main Author: McCleary, Jennifer(Jennifer A.)
• Other Authors: Martin C. Rinard.
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2021
• Subjects: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129921

Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February, 2020 === Cataloged from student-submitted PDF of thesis. === Includes bibliographical references (pages 67-74). === Pancreatic cancer is the third most lethal cancer in the U.S., causing an estimated 45,750 deaths in 2019. Of all treatments, surgical resection provides the best survival rate for pancreatic cancer. This is not feasible for the majority of pancreatic cancer patients, whose cancer is typically not diagnosed until the tumor is unresectable. Most symptoms of pancreatic cancer are typically subtle, which underscores the need for better risk modeling to predict a patient's chance of pancreatic cancer well before it would usually be diagnosed. We propose a series of novel models that apply standard machine learning techniques to Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to predict risk of pancreatic cancer in advance of cancer diagnosis. On the test dataset, two of our models achieved AUROCs of 0.85 (CI 0.81 - 0.90) and 0.79 (CI 0.77 - 0.82) with a 365-day lead time. === by Jennifer McCleary. === M. Eng. === M.Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science