Cancer is one of the main global health threats. Early personalized prediction of cancer incidence is crucial for the population at risk. This study introduces a novel cancer prediction model based on modern recurrent survival deep learning algorithms. The study includes 160,407 participants from the blood-based cohort of the Korea Cancer Prevention Research-II Biobank, which has been ongoing since 2004. Data linkages were designed to ensure anonymity, and data collection was carried out through nationwide medical examinations. Predictive performance on ten cancer sites, evaluated using the concordance index (c-index), was compared among nDeep and its multitask variation, Cox proportional hazard (PH) regression, DeepSurv, and DeepHit. Our models consistently achieved a c-index of over 0.8 for all ten cancers, with a peak of 0.8922 for lung cancer. They outperformed Cox PH regression and other survival deep neural networks. This study presents a survival deep learning model that demonstrates the highest predictive performance on censored health dataset, to the best of our knowledge. In the future, we plan to investigate the causal relationship between explanatory variables and cancer to reduce cancer incidence and mortality.

Ngoc-Dung Nguyen has completed her MPH at the National Cancer Center in South Korea and worked as a researcher with a focus on statistics and cancer epidemiology. With experience in both healthcare and artificial intelligence, she is now an AI Research Engineer at Moadata in South Korea.