Machine Learning-Based Model Helps to Decide which Patients May Benefit from Pancreatoduodenectomy

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is an invasive tumor with similar incidence and mortality rates. Pancreaticoduodenectomy has morbidity and mortality rates of up to 60% and 5%, respectively. The purpose of our study was to assess preoperative features contributing to unfavorable 1-year survival prognosis. Study Design: Retrospective, single-center study evaluating the impact of preoperative features on short-term survival outcomes in head PDAC patients. Forty-four prior features of 172 patients were tested using different supervised machine learning models. Patient records were randomly divided into training and validation sets (80–20%, respectively), and model performance was assessed by area under curve (AUC) and classification accuracy (CA). Additionally, 33 patients were included as an independent revalidation or holdout dataset group. Results: Eleven relevant features were identified: age, sex, Ca-19-9, jaundice, ERCP with biliary stent, neutrophils, lymphocytes, lymphocyte/neutrophil ratio, neoadjuvant treatment, imaging tumor size, and ASA. Tree regression (tree model) and logistic regression (LR) performed better than the other tested models. The tree model had an AUC = 0.92 and CA = 0.85. LR had an AUC = 0.74 and CA = 0.78, allowing the development of a nomogram based on absolute feature significance. The best performance model was the tree model which allows us to have a decision tree to help clinical decisions. Discussion and conclusions: Based only on preoperative data, it was possible to predict 1-year survival (91.5% vs. 78.1% alive and 70.9% vs. 76.6% deceased for the tree model and LR, respectively). These results contribute to informed decision-making in the selection of which patients with PDAC can benefit from pancreatoduodenectomy. A machine learning algorithm was developed for the recognition of unfavorable 1-year survival prognosis in patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. This will contribute to the identification of patients who would benefit from pancreatoduodenectomy. In our cohort, the tree regression model had an AUC = 0.92 and CA = 0.85, whereas the logistic regression had an AUC = 0.74 and CA = 0.78. To further inform decision-making, a decision tree based on tree regression was developed.