Interpretable machine learning for thyroid cancer recurrence predicton: Leveraging XGBoost and SHAP analysis.

Purpose: For patients suffering from differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC), several clinical, laboratory, and pathological features (including patient age, tumor size, extrathyroidal extension, or serum thyroglobulin levels) are currently used to identify recurrence risk. Validation and potential adjustment of their individual and combined prognostic values using a large patient cohort with several years of follow-up might improve the correct identification of patients at risk.

Methods: In this retrospective study, we developed an XGBoost model using clinical and biomarker features for accurate DTC recurrence prediction using a cohort of 1228 consecutive patients (965 papillary, and 263 follicular) that were treated at the Department of Nuclear Medicine at University Hospital Augsburg between 1976 and 2010.