P1218Deep learning survival analysis enhances the value of hybrid PET/CT for long-term cardiovascular event prediction
Authors: Juarez-Orozco L E , Benjamins J W , Maaniitty T , Saraste A , Van Der Harst P , Knuuti J 
Published: October 2019

Background

Deep Learning (DL) is revolutionizing cardiovascular medicine through complex data-pattern recognition. In spite of its success in the diagnosis of coronary artery disease (CAD), DL implementation for prognostic evaluation of cardiovascular events is still limited. Traditional survival models (e.g.Cox) notably incorporate the effect of time-to-event but are unable to exploit complex non-liner dependencies between large numbers of predictors. On the other hand, DL hasn't systematically incorporated time-to-event for prognostic evaluations. Long-term registries of hybrid PET/CT imaging represent a suitable substrate for DL-based survival analysis due the large amount of time-dependent structured variables that they convey. Therefore, we sought to evaluate the feasibility and performance of DL Survival Analysis in predicting the occurrence of myocardial infarction (MI) and death in a long-term registry of cardiac hybrid PET/CT.

Methods

Data from our PET/CT registry of symptomatic patients with intermediate CAD risk who underwent sequential CT angiography and 15O-water PET for suspected ischemia, was analyzed. The sample has been followed for a 6-year average for MI or death. Ten clinical variables were extracted from electronic records including cardiovascular risk factors, dyspnea and early revascularization. CT angiography images were evaluated segmentally for: presence of plaque, % of luminal stenosis and calcification (58 variables). Absolute stress PET myocardial perfusion data was evaluated globally and regionally across vascular territories (4 variables). Cox-Nnet (a deep survival neural network) was implemented in a 5-fold cross-validated 80:20 split for training and testing. Resulting DL-hazard ratios were operationalized and compared to the observed events developed during follow-up. The performance of Cox-Nnet evaluating structured CT, PET/CT, and PET/CT+clinical variables was compared to expert interpretation (operationalized as: normal coronaries, non-obstructive CAD, obstructive CAD) and to Calcium Score (CaSc), through the concordance (c)-index.

Results

There were 426 men and 525 women with a mean age of 61±9 years-old. Twenty-four MI and 49 deaths occurred during follow-up (1 month–9.6 years), while 11.5% patients underwent early revascularization. Cox-Nnet evaluation of PET/CT data (c-index=0.75) outperformed categorical expert interpretation (c-index=0.54) and CaSc (c-index=0.65), while hybrid PET/CT and PET/CT+clinical (c-index=0.75) variables demonstrated incremental performance overall independent from early revascularization.

Conclusion

Deep Learning Survival Analysis is feasible in the evaluation of cardiovascular prognostic data. It might enhance the value of cardiac hybrid PET/CT imaging data for predicting the long-term development of myocardial infarction and death. Further research into the implementation of Deep Learning for prognostic analyses in CAD is warranted.