AI-Driven Prediction of Symptom Trajectories in Cancer Care: A Deep Learning Approach for Chemotherapy Management

This study presents an advanced method for predicting symptom escalation in chemotherapy patients using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The accurate prediction of symptom escalation is critical in cancer care to enable timely interventions and improve symptom management to enhance patients' quality of life during treatment. The analytical dataset consists of daily self-reported symptom logs from chemotherapy patients, including a wide range of symptoms, such as nausea, fatigue, and pain. The original dataset was highly imbalanced, with approximately 84% of the data containing no symptom escalation. The data were resampled into varying interval lengths to address this imbalance and improve the model's ability to detect symptom escalation (n = 3 to n = 7 days). This allowed the model to predict significant changes in symptom severity across these intervals. The results indicate that shorter intervals (n = 3 days) yielded the highest overall performance, with the CNN model achieving an accuracy of 81%, precision of 87%, recall of 80%, and an F1 score of 83%. This was an improvement over the LSTM model, which had an accuracy of 79%, precision of 85%, recall of 79%, and an F1 score of 82%. The model's accuracy and recall declined as the interval length increased, though precision remained relatively stable. The findings demonstrate that both CNN's temporospatial feature extraction and LSTM's temporal modeling effectively capture escalation patterns in symptom progression. By integrating these predictive models into digital health systems, healthcare providers can offer more personalized and proactive care, enabling earlier interventions that may reduce symptom burden and improve treatment adherence. Ultimately, this approach has the potential to significantly enhance the overall quality of life for chemotherapy patients by providing real-time insights into symptom trajectories and guiding clinical decision making.