Deep Learning-Based Prediction of Post-treatment Survival in Hepatocellular Carcinoma Patients Using Pre-treatment CT Images and Clinical Data

The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate a model for predicting post-treatment survival in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients using their CT images and clinical information, including various treatment information. We collected pre-treatment contrast-enhanced CT images and clinical information including patient-related factors, initial treatment options, and survival status from 692 patients. The patient cohort was divided into a training cohort (n = 507), a testing cohort (n = 146), and an external CT cohort (n = 39), which included patients who underwent CT scans at other institutions. After model training using fivefold cross-validation, model validation was performed on both the testing cohort and the external CT cohort. Our cascaded model employed a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract features from CT images and derive final survival probabilities. These probabilities were obtained by concatenating previously predicted probabilities for each interval with the patient-related factors and treatment options. We utilized two consecutive fully connected layers for this process, resulting in a number of final outputs corresponding to the number of time intervals, with values representing conditional survival probabilities for each interval. Performance was assessed using the concordance index (C-index), the mean cumulative/dynamic area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (mC/D AUC), and the mean Brier score (mBS), calculated every 3 months. Through an ablation study, we found that using DenseNet-121 as the backbone network and setting the prediction interval to 6 months optimized the model's performance. The integration of multimodal data resulted in superior predictive capabilities compared to models using only CT images or clinical information (C index 0.824 95% CI 0.822–0.826, mC/D AUC 0.893 95% CI 0.891–0.895, and mBS 0.121 95% CI 0.120–0.123 for internal test cohort; C index 0.750 95% CI 0.747–0.753, mC/D AUC 0.819 95% CI 0.816–0.823, and mBS 0.159 95% CI 0.158–0.161 for external CT cohort, respectively). Our CNN-based discrete-time survival prediction model with CT images and clinical information demonstrated promising results in predicting post-treatment survival of patients with HCC.