Predicting Individual Survival Distributions Using ECG: A Deep Learning Approach Utilizing Features Extracted by a Learned Diagnostic Model

Abstract

In the field of healthcare, individual survival prediction is important for personalized treatment planning. This study presents machine learning algorithms for predicting Individual Survival Distributions (ISD) using electrocardiography (ECG) data in two different formats. The models, which predict time until death, are developed and evaluated on a large, population-based cohort from Alberta, Canada. Our results demonstrate that models trained on raw ECG waveforms significantly outperform those trained on traditional ECG measurements in several metrics, including concordance index, hinge L1 loss, margin L1 loss, and margin truncated L1 loss. Additionally, the integration of predicted probabilities from wide-range diagnostic tasks not only enhances our ISD models' performance but also makes them significantly superior to other models across all evaluation metrics in individual survival prediction tasks. This innovative approach highlights the potential to leverage insights from diagnostic models for prognostic tasks, such as individual survival prediction. These findings could have far-reaching implications for the development of personalized treatment plans and open new avenues for future research in survival prediction using ECGs.