Deep convolutional neural network for survival analysis with pathological images

Traditional Cox proportional hazard model for survival analysis are based on structured features like patients' sex, smoke years, BMI, etc. With the development of medical imaging technology, more and more unstructured medical images are available for diagnosis, treatment and survival analysis. Traditional survival models utilize these unstructured images by extracting human-designed features from them. However, we argue that those hand-crafted features have limited abilities in representing highly abstract information. In this paper, we for the first time develop a deep convolutional neural network for survival analysis (DeepConvSurv) with pathological images. The deep layers in our model could represent more abstract information compared with hand-crafted features from the images. Hence, it will improve the survival prediction performance. From our extensive experiments on the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) lung cancer data, we show that the proposed DeepConvSurv model improves significantly compared with four state-of-the-art methods.