Predicting the likelihood of survival is of paramount importance for
individuals diagnosed with cancer as it provides invaluable information
regarding prognosis at an early stage. This knowledge enables the formulation
of effective treatment plans that lead to improved patient outcomes. In the
past few years, deep learning models have provided a feasible solution for
assessing medical images, electronic health records, and genomic data to
estimate cancer risk scores. However, these models often fall short of their
potential because they struggle to learn regression-aware feature
representations. In this study, we propose Survival Rank-N Contrast (SurvRNC)
method, which introduces a loss function as a regularizer to obtain an ordered
representation based on the survival times. This function can handle censored
data and can be incorporated into any survival model to ensure that the learned
representation is ordinal. The model was extensively evaluated on a HEad \&
NeCK TumOR (HECKTOR) segmentation and the outcome-prediction task dataset. We
demonstrate that using the SurvRNC method for training can achieve higher
performance on different deep survival models. Additionally, it outperforms
state-of-the-art methods by 3.6% on the concordance index. The code is publicly
available on this https URL

该研究提出了 Survival Rank-N Contrast (SurvRNC) 方法，它引入了一个损失函数作为正则化器，以获得基于存活时间的有序表示，用于估计癌症风险评分，并在不同的深度生存模型上表现出更高的性能，并超过最先进方法的 3.6% 的符合指数。