Primary Care Datasets for Early Lung Cancer Detection: An AI Led Approach

Cancer is one of the most common and serious medical conditions, with significant challenges in the detection of cancer originating from the non-specific nature of symptoms and very low prevalence. For general practitioners (GPs), this can be particularly important, as they are the primary contact for patients for most medical conditions. This places high significance on using the data available to a GP to design decision support tools that will aid GPs in detecting cancer as early as possible. With pathology data being one of the datasets available in the GP electronic medical record (EMR), our work targets this type of data in an attempt to incorporate an early cancer detection tool in existing GP practices. We focus on utilizing full blood count pathology results to design features that can be used in an early cancer detection model 3 to 6 months ahead of standard diagnosis. This research focuses initially on lung cancer but can be extended to other types of cancer. Additional challenges are present in this type of data due to the irregular and infrequent nature of doing pathology tests, which are also considered in designing the AI solution. Our findings demonstrate that hematological measures from pathology data are a suitable choice for a cancer detection tool that can deliver early cancer diagnosis up to 6 months ahead for up to 8 out of 10 patients, in a way that is easily incorporated in current GP practice.