Results: A total of 10 688 adult patient samples representing 40 untreated primary tumor types and 26 adjacent-normal tissues were used for training. Demographic data were not available for all data sets. Among the training data set, 5157 of 10 244 (50.3%) were male and the mean (SD) age was 58.9 (14.5) years. An accuracy rate of 99% was obtained for primary epithelioid mesotheliomas tested (125 of 126). The remaining 85 mesotheliomas had a mixed etiology (sarcomatoid mesotheliomas) and were correctly identified as a mixture of their primary components, with potential implications in resolving subtypes and incidences of mixed histology.

We propose a deep learning model - Probabilistic Prognostic Estimates of Survival in Metastatic Cancer Patients (PPES-Met) for estimating short-term life expectancy (3 months) of the patients by analyzing free-text clinical notes in the electronic medical record, while maintaining the temporal visit sequence. In a single framework, we integrated semantic data mapping and neural embedding technique to produce a text processing method that extracts relevant information from heterogeneous types of clinical notes in an unsupervised manner, and we designed a recurrent neural network to model the temporal dependency of the patient visits. The model was trained on a large dataset (10,293 patients) and validated on a separated dataset (1818 patients). Our method achieved an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.89. To provide explain-ability, we developed an interactive graphical tool that may improve physician understanding of the basis for the model's predictions. The high accuracy and explain-ability of the PPES-Met model may enable our model to be used as a decision support tool to personalize metastatic cancer treatment and provide valuable assistance to the physicians.

Pathologists still do the bulk of their diagnosis of metastatic cancer cells in tissue and lymph nodes by hand, putting slides under a microscope and looking for signature irregularities they're trained to see. Recent advances in computer technology, however, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI), have begun to teach machines to do this kind of detection with growing rates of improvement. Now, a research team from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School have developed a form of AI that can interpret these pathology images with accuracy levels of 92.5 percent. Moreover, when the two are used in combination, the detection rate approaches 100 percent (approximately 99.5 percent). Their AI method is a form of deep learning, in which the system attempts to replicate the activity of the human neocortex through artificial neural networks.