A Game-Theoretical Approach to Clinical Decision Making with Immersive Visualisation

Cancer is a disease characterised by changes in combinations of genes within affected tumour cells. The deep understanding of genetic activity afforded to cancer specialists through complex genomics data analytics has advanced the clinical management of cancer by using deep machine learning algorithms and visualisation. However, most of the existing works do not integrate intelligent decision-making aids that can guide users in the analysis and exploration processes. This paper contributes a novel strategy that applies game theory within a VR-enabled immersive visualisation system designed as the decision support engine to mimic real-world interactions between stakeholders within complex relationships, in this case cancer clinicians. Our focus is to apply game theory to assist doctors in the decision-making process regarding the treatment options for rare-cancer patients. Nash Equilibrium and Social Optimality strategy profiles were used to facilitate complex analysis within the visualisation by inspecting which combination of genes and dimensionality reduction methods yields the best survival rate and by investigating the treatment protocol to form new hypotheses. Using a case simulation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of game theory in guiding the analyst with a patient cohort data interrogation system as compared to an analyst without a decision support system. Particularly, the strategy profile (t-SNE method and DNMT3B_ZBTB46_LAPTM4B gene) gains the highest payoff for the two doctors.