Predicting survival after transarterial chemoembolization for hepatocellular carcinoma using a neural network: A Pilot Study.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Deciding when to repeat and when to stop transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) can be difficult even for experienced investigators. Our aim was to develop a survival prediction model for such patients undergoing TACE using novel machine learning algorithms and to compare it to conventional prediction scores, ART, ABCR and SNACOR. METHODS For this retrospective analysis, 282 patients who underwent TACE for HCC at our tertiary referral centre between January 2005 and December 2017 were included in the final analysis. We built an artificial neural network (ANN) including all parameters used by the aforementioned risk scores a…