Improving personalized tumor growth predictions using a Bayesian combination of mechanistic modeling and machine learning

BACKGROUND: In clinical practice, a plethora of medical examinations are conducted to assess the state of a patient’s pathology producing a variety of clinical data. However, investigation of these data faces two major challenges. Firstly, we lack the knowledge of the mechanisms involved in regulating these data variables, and secondly, data collection is sparse in time since it relies on patient’s clinical presentation. The former limits the predictive accuracy of clinical outcomes for any mechanistic model. The latter restrains any machine learning algorithm to accurately infer the corresponding disease dynamics. METHODS: Here, we propose a novel method, based on the Bayesian coupling of mathematical modeling and machine learning, aiming at improving individualized predictions by addressing the aforementioned challenges. RESULTS: We evaluate the proposed method on a synthetic dataset for brain tumor growth and analyze its performance in predicting two relevant clinical outputs. The method results in improved predictions in almost all simulated patients, especially for those with a late clinical presentation (>95% patients show improvements compared to standard mathematical modeling). In addition, we test the methodology in two additional settings dealing with real patient cohorts. In both cases, namely cancer growth in chronic lymphocytic leukemia and ovarian cancer, predictions show excellent agreement with reported clinical outcomes (around 60% reduction of mean squared error). CONCLUSIONS: We show that the combination of machine learning and mathematical modeling approaches can lead to accurate predictions of clinical outputs in the context of data sparsity and limited knowledge of disease mechanisms.