Explainable machine learning for predicting recurrence-free survival in endometrial carcinosarcoma patients

Objectives: Endometrial carcinosarcoma is a rare, aggressive high-grade endometrial cancer, accounting for about 5% of all uterine cancers and 15% of deaths from uterine cancers. The treatment can be complex, and the prognosis is poor. Its increasing incidence underscores the urgent requirement for personalized approaches in managing such challenging diseases. Method: In this work, we designed an explainable machine learning approach to predict recurrence-free survival in patients affected by endometrial carcinosarcoma. For this purpose, we exploited the predictive power of clinical and histopathological data, as well as chemotherapy and surgical information collected for a cohort of 80 patients monitored over time. Among these patients, 32.5% have experienced the appearance of a recurrence. Results: The designed model was able to well describe the observed sequence of events, providing a reliable ranking of the survival times based on the individual risk scores, and achieving a C-index equals to 70.00% (95% CI, 59.38–84.74). Conclusion: Accordingly, machine learning methods could support clinicians in discriminating between endometrial carcinosarcoma patients at low-risk or high-risk of recurrence, in a non-invasive and inexpensive way. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study proposing a preliminary approach addressing this task.