Routine laboratory trajectories encode the onset of organ-level complications in cancer
About
Routine laboratory panels drawn during cancer treatment constitute longitudinal physiological recordings of organ function, yet their temporal structure is discarded by single-timepoint prognostic tools. A transformer trained on 2,777,595 laboratory measurements from 3,905 patients with multiple myeloma or ovarian cancer predicted the two-year onset of 162 treatment-associated complications, including therapy-related myelodysplastic syndromes, spanning eight clinical categories, achieving 1.5- to 6.1-fold enrichment above prevalence at the group level. It matched or outperformed non-sequential baselines across grouped endpoints (AUROC gains up to +0.11), demonstrating that longitudinal laboratory trajectories capture evolving complication-specific physiology inaccessible from isolated measurements. Predictions generalised across both cancers, divergence concentrating in disease-specific complications, and biomarker masking recovered signatures consistent with established pathophysiology. External validation on MIMIC-IV and MMRF CoMMpass confirmed transferability across independent healthcare systems (AUROC up to 0.85). Routine oncological laboratory data encode organ deterioration weeks to months before clinical onset, enabling complication-specific surveillance without additional testing infrastructure.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diagnosis prediction | held-out (test) | Median AUROC0.917 | 66 | |
| Diagnostic Endpoint Prediction | MIMIC IV | AUROC (Median)0.827 | 27 | |
| Diagnostic Endpoint Prediction | MMRF CoMMpass | AUROC (Median)75.3 | 24 | |
| Acute kidney failure, stage 1 (N17.91) prediction | Laboratory measurements 10–30 day intervals prior to diagnosis (test) | AUROC (Median)79 | 3 | |
| All-cause mortality prediction | Laboratory measurements 10–30 day intervals prior to diagnosis (test) | Median AUROC0.697 | 3 | |
| Escherichia coli (B96.2) prediction | Laboratory measurements 10–30 day intervals prior to diagnosis (test) | AUROC (Median)0.661 | 3 | |
| Essential hypertension, benign (I10.00) prediction | Laboratory measurements 10–30 day intervals prior to diagnosis (test) | AUROC (Median)0.722 | 3 | |
| Essential hypertension, unspec. (I10.90) prediction | Laboratory measurements 10–30 day intervals prior to diagnosis (test) | AUROC (Median)76.8 | 3 | |
| ICD-10-GM endpoint prediction | MMRF CoMMpass external IA24 (val) | AUROC (Median)0.691 | 3 | |
| Other hypothyroidism (E03.8) prediction | Laboratory measurements 10–30 day intervals prior to diagnosis (test) | AUROC (Median)0.694 | 3 |