Francesca Orlandini

Mrs. Francesca Orlandini


Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

2Years (2025-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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27 March 2025 in BioMedInformatics
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
LSLisa Anita De Santi
Lisa Anita De Santi
FOFrancesca Orlandini
Francesca Orlandini
Vincenzo PositanoVincenzo Positano
Vincenzo Positano
Laura PistoiaLaura Pistoia
Laura Pistoia
FSFrancesco Sorrentino
Francesco Sorrentino
Antonella MeloniAntonella Meloni
Antonella Meloni
Survival analysis is a statistical approach widely employed to model the time of an event, such as a patient’s death. Classical approaches include the Kaplan–Meier estimator and Cox proportional hazards regression, which assume a linear relationship between the model’s covariates. However, the linearity assumption might pose challenges with high-dimensional data, thus stimulating interest in performing survival analysis using neural network models. In the present work, we implemented a deep Cox neural network (Cox-net) to predict the time of a cardiac event using patient data collected from the Myocardial Iron Overload in Thalassemia (MIOT) project. Cox-net achieved a concordance index (c-index) of 0.812 ± 0.036, outperforming the classical Cox regression (0.790 ± 0.040), and it demonstrated resilience to varying levels of censored patients. A permutation feature importance analysis identified fibrosis and sex as the most significant predictors, aligning with clinical knowledge. Cox-net was able to represent the nonlinear relationships between covariates and maintain reliable survival curve predictions in datasets with a large number of censored patients, making it a promising tool for determining the appropriate clinical pathway for thalassemic patients.