Childhood brain tumor prognosis moves past subgroup labels: MANTIS draws 10-year individual survival curves from methylation, reaching c-index 0.80
Treating childhood medulloblastoma and ependymoma means trading recurrence risk against the long-term side effects of radiotherapy, yet current clinical indicators and molecular subgroups only give group-level risk. MANTIS takes genome-wide DNA methylation array data plus gene-level copy-number variation and uses a neural network to output individualized 10-year survival probability curves, reaching a c-index as high as 0.80 ± 0.07 in independent clinical trial cohorts, above current clinical indicators and subgroup-only models. An extension of the same framework flags about 60% of average-risk medulloblastoma patients who showed no significant survival disadvantage (P = 0.683) under lower-dose craniospinal irradiation.