Clinically verified pre-screening for cancer using web search queries: Initial results

Search engine queries have been demonstrated to be a useful signal for screening people for different cancer types. Past work focused on a biased population which indicated that they were suffering from the condition, or else inferred which people had the condition of interest using their queries. Here we used a combination of an online advertising campaign and a clinically verified questionnaire to identify at-risk people, and correlated their past queries with these risk scores. People who suspected they were suffering from lung, breast, or colon cancer were recruited through ads shown on the Bing search engine to complete a clinically verified risk questionnaire. Of those, 201 people agreed to participate in the research and their past queries could be obtained. An automated classifier to predict their risk score based on past queries reached an Area Under the ROC (AUC) of 0.64 for all cancers, and 0.76 for colon cancer. These results demonstrate the utility of search engine queries to screen for cancer and are the represent the first step in utilizing advertising systems to screen for cancer and detect it earlier than has been previously possible.