A Hierarchy-driven Multi-label Network with Label Constraints for Post-operative Complication Prediction of Lung Cancer*

Lung cancer is one of the most dangerous cancers all over the world. Surgical resection remains the only potentially curative option for patients with lung cancer. However, this invasive treatment often causes various complications, which seriously endanger patient health. In this study, we proposed a novel multi-label network, namely a hierarchy-driven multi-label network with label constraints (HDMN-LC), to predict the risk of complications of lung cancer patients. In this method, we first divided all complications into pulmonary and cardiovascular complication groups and employed the hierarchical cluster algorithm to analyze the hierarchies between these complications. After that, we employed the hierarchies to drive the network architecture design so that related complications could share more hidden features. And then, we combined all complications and employed an auxiliary task to predict whether any complications would occur to impose the bottom layer to learn general features. Finally, we proposed a regularization term to constrain the relationship between specific and combined complication labels to improve performance. We conducted extensive experiments on real clinical data of 593 patients. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the single-label, multi-label baseline methods, with an average AUC value of 0.653. And the results also prove the effectiveness of hierarchy-driven network architecture and label constraints. We conclude that the proposed method can predict complications for lung cancer patients more effectively than the baseline methods.Clinical relevance—This study presents a novel multi-label network that can more accurately predict the risk of specific postoperative complications for lung cancer patients. The method can help clinicians identify high-risk patients more accurately and timely so that interventions can be implemented in advance to ensure patient safety