A Deep Multi-Task Network to Learn Tumor Pathological Representations for Lymph Node Metastasis Prediction.

Lymph node metastasis is of paramount importance for patient treatment decision-making, prognosis evaluation, and clinical trial enrollment. However, accurate preoperative diagnosis remains challenging. In this study, we proposed a multi-task network to learn the primary tumor pathological features using the pT stage prediction task and leverage these features to facilitate lymph node metastasis prediction. We conducted experiments using electronic medical record data from 681 patients with non-small cell lung cancer. The proposed method achieved a 0.768 area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) value with a 0.073 standard deviation (SD) and a 0.448 average precision (AP) value with a 0.113 SD for lymph node metastasis prediction, which significantly outperformed the baseline models. Based on the results, we can conclude that the proposed multi-task method can effectively learn representations about tumor pathological conditions to support lymph node metastasis prediction.