Thy-DAMP: deep artificial neural network model for prediction of thyroid cancer mortality

Despite the rising incidence of differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC), mortality rates have remained relatively low yet crucial for effective patient management. This study aims to develop a deep neural network capable of predicting mortality in patients with differentiated thyroid cancer.

Leveraging data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, we developed Thy-DAMP (Deep Artificial Neural Network Model for Prediction of Thyroid Cancer) to forecast mortality in DTC patients. The dataset comprised demographic, histologic, and staging information. Following data normalization and feature encoding, the dataset was partitioned into training, testing, and validation subsets, with model hyperparameters fine-tuned via cross-validation.

Among the 63,513 patients, the mean age was 48.22 years (SD = 14.8), with 77.32% being female. Papillary carcinoma emerged as the predominant subtype, representing 62.94% of cases. The majority presented with stage I disease (73.96%). Thy-DAMP demonstrated acceptable performance metrics on both the test and validation sets. Sensitivity was 83.24% (95% CI 76.95–88.40%), specificity was 93.53% (95% CI 93.01–94.02%), and accuracy stood at 93.33% (95% CI 92.82–93.83%). The model exhibited a positive predictive value of 19.76% (95% CI 18.20–21.42%) and a negative predictive value of 99.66% (95% CI 99.53–99.75%). Additionally, Thy-DAMP demonstrated a positive likelihood ratio of 12.86 (95% CI 11.62–14.23), a negative likelihood ratio of 0.18 (95% CI 0.13–0.25), and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.95. The model was externally validated on a separate dataset with nearly identical performance.

Thy-DAMP showcases considerable promise in accurately predicting mortality in DTC patients, leveraging limited set of patient data.