Evidence Hub

Development and internal-external validation of statistical and machine learning models for breast cancer prognostication: cohort study

A. Clift, D. Dodwell, S. Lord, S. Petrou, M. Brady, G. Collins, J. Hippisley-Cox

British medical journal, 2023

141 participants · 98 citations

Abstract

Abstract Objective To develop a clinically useful model that estimates the 10 year risk of breast cancer related mortality in women (self-reported female sex) with breast cancer of any stage, comparing results from regression and machine learning approaches. Design Population based cohort study. Setting QResearch primary care database in England, with individual level linkage to the national cancer registry, Hospital Episodes Statistics, and national mortality registers. Participants 141 765 women aged 20 years and older with a diagnosis of invasive breast cancer between 1 January 2000 and 31 December 2020. Main outcome measures Four model building strategies comprising two regression (Cox proportional hazards and competing risks regression) and two machine learning (XGBoost and an artificial neural network) approaches. Internal-external cross validation was used for model evaluation. Random effects meta-analysis that pooled estimates of discrimination and calibration metrics, calibration plots, and decision curve analysis were used to assess model performance, transportability, and clinical utility. Results During a median 4.16 years (interquartile range 1.76-8.26) of follow-up, 21 688 breast cancer related deaths and 11 454 deaths from other causes occurred. Restricting to 10 years maximum follow-up from breast cancer diagnosis, 20 367 breast cancer related deaths occurred during a total of 688 564.81 person years. The crude breast cancer mortality rate was 295.79 per 10…

How strong is the evidence?

Evidence Hub reads this as a cohort study, done in people. Its evidence level is 3 of 5 (Moderate · trial / cohort / secondary analysis). Trials without a large randomized design, cohorts and secondary analyses give moderate evidence. Reported size: 141 participants or records.

How the five levels of evidence work. The level is assigned automatically from the abstract and can be wrong, so check the paper.

Read the paper

Related studies

Go deeper in Evidence Hub

Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.

Open this study Sign up free