Grant Number:	5R37CA277812-03 Interpret this number
Primary Investigator:	Zhang, Lanjing
Organization:	Rutgers Biomedical And Health Sciences
Project Title:	SCH: Screening and Confirmatory Machine Learning for Explainable Modeling of Non-Cancer Deaths in Cancer Patients
Fiscal Year:	2024

Due to the high stakes of healthcare, the primary barrier is the extremely low tolerance of errors in healthcare practice, which requires extremely high sensitivity and specificity of any modelling. However, nearly all Machine learning (ML) models focus on improving the accuracy. It cannot yet reach both extremely high sensitivity and specificity using healthcare data. Separate screening and confirmatory ML tools are proposed to achieve very high sensitivity and specificity. Moreover, many ML algorithms suffer from the lack of clear explanations, such as deep learning and neural networks, and would unlikely meet the FAIR criteria. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S. The number of cancer survivors continues to grow; unfortunately, so does the number of non-cancer deaths in cancer patients. However, nearly all `omic and large population studies focused on binary outcomes (cancer death or recurrence). Therefore, there is an urgent need to better understand and reduce non-cancer deaths in cancer patients, using `omic and population data. To address these problems, the project will develop screening and confirmatory ML to model cancer and noncancer deaths in breast, colorectal, prostate and lung cancer patients using `omic data and electronic health records (EHR). The proposed research will result in fundamental contribution to ML tools, workflows and methods to make novel use of `omic and EHR data for cancer care. It timely meets the urgent needs in precise reduction of non-cancer deaths. This project also uniquely addresses the Transformative Data Science research theme. The interdisciplinary collaboration in this project as outlined in the Collaboration Plan will offer a diverse basis for creative problem solving and validation. The proposal has 3 broader impacts: 1) The developed novel ML algorithms and technology will enable physicians to more precisely prognosticate and treat cancer patients based on their risk of multicategory deaths. 2) The research program will support and nurture undergraduate and graduate researchers. 3) The proposed research program will support high school and undergraduate students both in the conduct of research and in awareness of ML usefulness.