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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Learning risk models for pancreatic cancer from electronic health records

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Pancreatic cancer is the third most lethal cancer in the U.S., causing an estimated 45,750 deaths in 2019. Of all treatments, surgical resection provides the best survival rate for pancreatic cancer. This is not feasible for the majority of pancreatic cancer patients, whose cancer is typically not diagnosed until the tumor is unresectable. Most symptoms of pancreatic cancer are typically subtle, which underscores the need for better risk modeling to predict a patient's chance of pancreatic cancer well before it would usually be diagnosed. We propose a series of novel models that apply standard machine learning techniques to Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to predict risk of pancreatic cancer in advance of cancer diagnosis. On the test dataset, two of our models achieved AUROCs of 0.85 (CI 0.81 - 0.90) and 0.79 (CI 0.77 - 0.82) with a 365-day lead time.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2020

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • McCleary, Jennifer(Jennifer A.)
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Martin C. Rinard.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129921
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/129921

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

McCleary, Jennifer(Jennifer A.). Learning risk models for pancreatic cancer from electronic health records. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129921