Artificial intelligence for predicting five-year survival in stage IV metastatic breast cancer patients: A focus on sarcopenia and other host factors

We developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that can predict five-year survival in patients with stage IV metastatic breast cancer, mainly based on host factors and sarcopenia. From a prospectively built breast cancer registry, a total of 210 metastatic breast cancer patients were selected in a consecutive manner using inclusion/exclusion criteria. The patients’ data were divided into two categories: a group that survived for more than 5 years and a group that did not survive for 5 years. For the AI model input, 11 features were considered, including age, body mass index, skeletal muscle area (SMA), height-relative SMA (H-SMI), height square-relative SMA (H(2)-SMA), weight-relative SMA (W-SMA), muscle mass, anticancer chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and comorbid diseases such as hypertension and mellitus. For the feature importance analysis, we compared classifiers using six different machine learning algorithms and found that extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) provided the best accuracy. Subsequently, we performed the feature importance analysis based on XGBoost and proposed a 4-layer deep neural network, which considered the top 10 ranked features. Our proposed 4-layer deep neural network provided high sensitivity (75.00%), specificity (78.94%), accuracy (78.57%), balanced accuracy (76.97%), and an area under receiver operating characteristics of 0.90. We generated a web application for anyone to easily access and use this AI model to predict five-year survival. We expect this web application to be helpful for patients to understand the importance of host factors and sarcopenia and achieve survival gain.