Artificial neural networks versus LASSO regression for the prediction of long-term survival after surgery for invasive IPMN of the pancreas.

Prediction of long-term survival in patients with invasive intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm (IPMN) of the pancreas may aid in patient assessment, risk stratification and personalization of treatment. This study aimed to investigate the predictive ability of artificial neural networks (ANN) and LASSO regression in terms of 5-year disease-specific survival. ANN work in a non-linear fashion, having a potential advantage in analysis of variables with complex correlations compared to regression models. LASSO is a type of regression analysis facilitating variable selection and regularization. A total of 440 patients undergoing surgical treatment for invasive IPMN of the pancreas registered in the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database between 2004 and 2016 were analyzed. The dataset was prior to analysis randomly split into a modelling and test set (7:3). The accuracy, precision and F1 score for predicting mortality were 0.82, 0.83 and 0.89, respectively for ANN with variable selection compared to 0.79, 0.85 and 0.87, respectively for the LASSO-model. ANN using all variables showed similar accuracy, precision and F1 score of 0.81, 0.85 and 0.88, respectively compared to a logistic regression analysis. McNemar´s test showed no statistical difference between the models. The models showed high and similar performance with regard to accuracy and precision for predicting 5-year survival status.