3D Non-Local Neural Network: A Non-Invasive Biomarker for Immunotherapy Treatment Outcome Prediction. Case-Study: Metastatic Urothelial Carcinoma

Immunotherapy is regarded as one of the most significant breakthroughs in cancer treatment. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of patients respond properly to the treatment. Moreover, to date, there are no efficient bio-markers able to early discriminate the patients eligible for this treatment. In order to help overcome these limitations, an innovative non-invasive deep pipeline, integrating Computed Tomography (CT) imaging, is investigated for the prediction of a response to immunotherapy treatment. We report preliminary results collected as part of a case study in which we validated the implemented method on a clinical dataset of patients affected by Metastatic Urothelial Carcinoma. The proposed pipeline aims to discriminate patients with high chances of response from those with disease progression. Specifically, the authors propose ad-hoc 3D Deep Networks integrating Self-Attention mechanisms in order to estimate the immunotherapy treatment response from CT-scan images and such hemato-chemical data of the patients. The performance evaluation (average accuracy close to 92%) confirms the effectiveness of the proposed approach as an immunotherapy treatment response biomarker.