PanMETAI - a high performance tabular foundation model for accurate pancreatic cancer diagnosis via NMR metabolomics

Late diagnosis and the lack of effective early detection techniques contribute to the poor prognosis of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). To address this challenge, we develop ¹H NMR-based metabolomics-AI platforms employing customized multilayer support vector machine (SVM), AutoGluon, and Tabular Foundation Model (TabPFN) frameworks. These platforms integrate serum metabolomic profiles-including small-molecule metabolites and lipoproteins-with clinical/biochemical parameters (age, CA19-9) and Activin A, derived from 902 participants (424 high-risk controls and 478 PDAC cases). Our TabPFN-based algorithm, PanMETAI, outperform state-of-the-art models. In the Taiwanese training and validation cohort, the model achieved an impressive AUC of 0.99 (95% CI: 0.98-0.99). Its robustness is further confirmed in a Lithuanian external validation cohort (n = 322), which yields an AUC of 0.93 (0.90-0.95). Notably, it identifies key signature patterns that improve early-stage (I/II) PDAC diagnosis and perform well with small sample sizes (n = 50). TabPFN-PanMETAI offers a rapid, accurate, and non-invasive tool for early PDAC detection, with strong potential for clinical application.