Multi-Type Interdependent Feature Analysis Based on Hybrid Neural Networks for Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor Mutations

The mutation status of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is an important clinical reference indicator for lung cancer diagnosis and treatment. However, the extraction of effective discriminative features for non-invasive computer-aided EGFR mutation prediction still poses a big challenge. In this paper, multiple types of features are designed and analyzed to address this problem. These features include clinical features based on prior medical knowledge and quantitative image features extracted by convolutional neural networks (CNN). A long short-term memory (LSTM) network is also introduced to exploit the dependency between these feature types and then fuse them. In particular, a CNN is constructed to extract quantitative features of computed-tomography (CT) images. Furthermore, a LSTM is utilized to analyze the dependency between these clinical and CT image features and generate a new feature representation for computer-aided diagnosis. For samples from the same category, the proposed method deal with feature representation variabilities arising from interdependencies in multi-type features and patient specificity. The multiple feature types of the collected clinical data are used to assess the proposed approach and other relevant algorithms. Our results demonstrate that the multi-type dependency-based feature representation shows superior performance (Accuracy = 75%, AUC = 0.78) compared to single-type feature representations. The proposed method is reliable to apply for diagnosing of the EGFR mutation status.