Survival Prediction in Patients with Colorectal Cancer Using Artificial Neural Network and Cox Regression

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third prevalent cancer worldwide, and it includes 10% of all cancer mortality. In Iran, men and women have the third and the fourth incidence rate of CRC, respectively. Survival analysis methods deal with data that measure the time until an event occurs. Artificial neural networks (ANN) and Cox regression are methods for survival analysis.

The current study was designated to determine related factors to CRC patients’ survival using ANN and Cox regression.

In this historical cohort, information of patients who were diagnosed with CRC in Omid Hospital of Mashhad was collected. A total of 157 subjects were investigated from 2006 to 2011 and were followed up until 2016. In ANN, data were divided into two groups of training and testing, and the best neural network architecture was determined based on the area under the ROC curve (AUC). Cox regression model was also fitted and the accuracy of these two models in survival prediction was compared by AUC.

The mean and standard deviation of age was 56.4 ± 14.6 years. The three-, five- and seven-year survival rates of patients were 0.67, 0.62, and 0.58, respectively. Using test dataset, the area under curve was estimated 0.759 for the chosen model in ANN and 0.544 for Cox regression model.

In this study, ANN is an appropriate approach for predicting CRC patients’ survival which was superior to Cox regression. Thus, it is recommended for predicting and also determining the influence of risk factors on patients’ survival.