Tunç Sait, Alagoz Oguzhan, Burnside Elizabeth S
Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Virginia Tech Blacksburg Virginia USA.
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison Wisconsin USA.
Prod Oper Manag. 2022 May;31(5):2361-2378. doi: 10.1111/poms.13691. Epub 2022 Mar 8.
Overdiagnosis of breast cancer, defined as diagnosing a cancer that would otherwise not cause symptoms or death in a patient's lifetime, costs U.S. health care system over $1.2 billion annually. Overdiagnosis rates, estimated to be around 10%-40%, may be reduced if indolent breast findings can be identified and followed with noninvasive imaging rather than biopsy. However, there are no validated guidelines for radiologists to decide when to choose imaging options recognizing cancer grades and types. The aim of this study is to optimize breast cancer diagnostic decisions based on cancer types using a large-scale finite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP) model with 4.6 million states to help reduce overdiagnosis. We prove the optimality of a divide-and-search algorithm that relies on tight upper bounds on the optimal decision thresholds to find an exact optimal solution. We project the high-dimensional MDP onto two lower dimensional MDPs and obtain feasible upper bounds on the optimal decision thresholds. We use real data from two private mammography databases and demonstrate our model performance through a previously validated simulation model that has been used by the policy makers to set the national screening guidelines in the United States. We find that a decision-analytical framework optimizing diagnostic decisions while accounting for breast cancer types has a strong potential to improve the quality of life and alleviate the immense costs of overdiagnosis. Our model leads to a reduction in overdiagnosis on the screening population, which translates into an annual savings of approximately $300 million for the U.S. health care system.
乳腺癌的过度诊断,定义为诊断出一种在患者一生中原本不会引起症状或导致死亡的癌症,每年给美国医疗保健系统造成超过12亿美元的损失。如果能识别出惰性乳腺病变并采用非侵入性成像而非活检进行跟踪,估计约10%-40%的过度诊断率可能会降低。然而,对于放射科医生而言,尚无经过验证的指南来决定何时选择能够识别癌症分级和类型的成像选项。本研究的目的是使用具有460万个状态的大规模有限期马尔可夫决策过程(MDP)模型,根据癌症类型优化乳腺癌诊断决策,以帮助减少过度诊断。我们证明了一种分治算法的最优性,该算法依赖于最优决策阈值的严格上界来找到精确的最优解。我们将高维MDP投影到两个低维MDP上,并获得最优决策阈值的可行上界。我们使用来自两个私人乳腺X线摄影数据库的真实数据,并通过一个先前经过验证的模拟模型来展示我们模型的性能,该模型已被政策制定者用于制定美国的国家筛查指南。我们发现,一个在考虑乳腺癌类型的同时优化诊断决策的决策分析框架,具有改善生活质量和减轻过度诊断巨大成本的强大潜力。我们的模型使筛查人群的过度诊断减少,这为美国医疗保健系统每年节省约3亿美元。