Machine Learning Techniques in Prostate Cancer Diagnosis According to Prostate-Specific Antigen Levels and Prostate Cancer Gene 3 Score

Purpose: To explore the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) techniques in oncological urology. In recent years, our group investigated the prostate cancer gene 3 (PCA3) score, prostate-specific antigen (PSA), and free-PSA predictive role for prostate cancer (PCa), using the classical binary logistic regression (LR) modeling. In this research, we approached the same clinical problem by several different ML algorithms, to evaluate their performances and feasibility in a real-world evidence PCa detection trial.Materials and Methods: The occurrence of a positive biopsy has been studied in a large cohort of 1,246 Italian men undergoing first or repeat biopsy. Seven supervised ML algorithms were selected to build biomarkers-based predictive models: generalized linear model, gradient boosting machine, eXtreme gradient boosting machine (XGBoost), distributed random forest/ extremely randomized forest, multilayer artificial Deep Neural Network, naïve Bayes classifier, and an automatic ML ensemble function.Results: All the ML models showed better performances in terms of area under curve (AUC) and accuracy, when compared to LR model. Among them, an XGBoost model tuned by the autoML function reached the best metrics (AUC, 0.830), well overtaking LR results (AUC, 0.738). In the variable importance ranking coming from this XGBoost model (accuracy, 0.824), the PCA3 score importance was 3-fold and 4-fold larger, when compared to that of free-PSA and PSA, respectively.Conclusions: The ML approach proved to be feasible and able to achieve good predictive performances with reproducible results: it may thus be recommended, when applied to PCa prediction based on biomarkers fluctuations.