Roses Have Thorns: Understanding the Downside of Oncological Care Delivery Through Visual Analytics and Sequential Rule Mining

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visual analytics system combined with sequential rule mining to interpret complex symptom progression data in cancer patients, aiding personalized treatment decisions and understanding long-term side effects.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel human-machine visual system that enhances interpretability of sequential rule mining outputs in cancer symptom research, supporting personalized predictive modeling.

Findings

System effectively supports clinical and symptom research.

Improves interpretability of sequential rule mining in medical data.

Facilitates mechanistic knowledge discovery in oncology.

Abstract

Personalized head and neck cancer therapeutics have greatly improved survival rates for patients, but are often leading to understudied long-lasting symptoms which affect quality of life. Sequential rule mining (SRM) is a promising unsupervised machine learning method for predicting longitudinal patterns in temporal data which, however, can output many repetitive patterns that are difficult to interpret without the assistance of visual analytics. We present a data-driven, human-machine analysis visual system developed in collaboration with SRM model builders in cancer symptom research, which facilitates mechanistic knowledge discovery in large scale, multivariate cohort symptom data. Our system supports multivariate predictive modeling of post-treatment symptoms based on during-treatment symptoms. It supports this goal through an SRM, clustering, and aggregation back end, and a custom front end to help develop and tune the predictive models. The system also explains the resulting predictions in the context of therapeutic decisions typical in personalized care delivery. We evaluate the resulting models and system with an interdisciplinary group of modelers and head and neck oncology researchers. The results demonstrate that our system effectively supports clinical and symptom research.