Deep learning model for prediction of hepatocellular carcinoma in patients with HBV-related cirrhosis on antiviral therapy

Background & Aims: Personalised risk prediction of the development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) among patients with liver cirrhosis on potent antiviral therapy is important for targeted screening and individualised intervention. This study aimed to develop and validate a new model for risk prediction of HCC development based on deep learning, and to compare it with previously reported risk models. Methods: A novel deep-learning-based model was developed from a cohort of 424 patients with HBV-related cirrhosis on entecavir therapy with 2 residual blocks, including 7 layers of a neural network, and it was validated using an independent external cohort (n = 316). The deep-learning-based model was compared to 6 previously reported models (platelet, age, and gender-hepatitis B score [PAGE-B], Chinese University HCC score [CU-HCC], HCC-Risk Estimating Score in CHB patients Under Entecavir [HCC-RESCUE], age, diabetes, race, etiology of cirrhosis, sex, and severity HCC score [ADRESS-HCC], modified PAGE-B score [mPAGE], and Toronto HCC risk index [THRI]) using Harrell's concordance (c)-index. Results: During a median 5.2 yr of follow-up (inter-quartile range 2.8–6.9 yr), 86 patients (20.3%) developed HCC. The deep-learning-based model had a Harrell's c-index of 0.719 in the derivation cohort and 0.782 in the validation cohort. Goodness of fit was confirmed by the Hosmer-Lemeshow test (p >0.05). Moreover, this model in the validation cohort had the highest c-index among the 6 previously reported models: PAGE-B (0.570), CU-HCC (0.548), HCC-RESCUE (0.577), ADRESS-HCC (0.551), mPAGE (0.598), and THRI (0.587) (all p <0.001). The misclassification rate of this model was 23.7% (model accuracy: 76.3%) in the validation group. Conclusions: The deep-learning-based model had better performance than the previous models for predicting the HCC risk in patients with HBV-related cirrhosis on potent antivirals. Lay summary: For early detection of hepatocellular carcinoma, it is important to maintain regular surveillance. However, there is currently no standard prediction model for risk stratification that can be used to establish a personalised surveillance strategy. We develop and validate a deep-learning-based model that showed better performance than previous models.