Predicting the Risk Factors of Second Primary Cancer in Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Screening for cancer and improved treatments have not only improved treatment outcomes and patient survival but have also led to an increase in the number of second primary cancers (SPCs). Hepatocellular carcinoma has been a common occurrence in Taiwan over the past decade. The mortality rate is second only to malignant tumors of lung cancer, and it also represents the fourth highest cancer medical expenditure. This study aimed to use machine learning to identify the risk factors for Hepatocellular carcinoma survivors. Of 378,445 datasets, including 15,251 from patients with SPCs, were collected; 18 predictive variables were considered risk factors for SPCs based on the physician panel discussion. The machine learning techniques employed included support vector machine, C5 decision tree, and random forest. SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique) sampling method was used to resolve the imbalance problem. The results showed that the top 5 risk factors for SPCs were tumor size, clinical stage, surgery, total bilirubin, and BCLC Stage. The support vector machine method had the highest predicted accuracy (0.7673). The risk factors extracted from the classification models and association rules will be used to provide valuable information for HCC therapy.