Artificial Neural Network Individualised Prediction of Time to Colorectal Cancer Surgery

Table 2

The relative importance of each variable used in each ANN construction is displayed for each analysis. The requirement of neoadjuvant therapy understandably holds importance for 8 and 12 weeks. American Society of Anaesthesiologists score (ASA) is seen to hold importance at all timepoints.

Time from diagnosis to surgery	ANN variable	Importance	Normalised importance
4 weeks	Gender	.077	33.7%
	ASA	.153	67.5%
	Tumour location	.143	63.0%
	Stage	.157	69.4%
	Neoadjuvant treatment	.071	31.3%
	Stoma planned	.079	34.8%
	Age	.093	40.9%
	Body mass index	.227	100.0%
8 weeks	Gender	.050	18.9%
	ASA	.169	63.7%
	Tumour location	.007	2.6%
	Stage	.149	56.0%
	Neoadjuvant treatment	.266	100.0%
	Stoma planned	.062	23.4%
	Age	.173	65.0%
	Body mass index	.124	46.7%
12 weeks	Male gender	.034	10.9%
	ASA	.148	48.1%
	Tumour location	.027	8.9%
	Stage	.125	40.5%
	Neoadjuvant treatment	.308	100.0%
	Stoma planned	.076	24.7%
	Age	.234	76.1%
	Body mass index	.048	15.7%