Prediction of radiation induced liver disease using artificial neural networks.

Objective: To evaluate the efficiency of predicting radiation induced liver disease (RILD) with an artificial neural network (ANN) model.

Methods And Materials: From August 2000 to November 2004, a total of 93 primary liver carcinoma (PLC) patients with single lesion and associated with hepatic cirrhosis of Child-Pugh grade A, were treated with hypofractionated three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (3DCRT). Eight out of 93 patients were diagnosed RILD. Ninety-three patients were randomly divided into two subsets (training set and verification set). In model A, the ratio of patient numbers was 1:1 for training and verification set, and in model B, the ratio was 2:1.

Results: The areas under receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curves were 0.8897 and 0.8831 for model A and B, respectively. Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive prediction value (PPV) and negative prediction value (NPV) were 0.875 (7/8), 0.882 (75/85), 0.882 (82/93), 0.412 (7/17) and 0.987 (75/76) for model A, and 0.750 (6/8), 0.800 (68/85), 0.796 (74/93), 0.261 (6/23) and 0.971 (68/70) for model B.

Conclusion: ANN was proved high accuracy for prediction of RILD. It could be used together with other models and dosimetric parameters to evaluate hepatic irradiation plans.