Timely pre- and post-diagnosis check-ups are critical for cancer patients, across all cancer types, as these often lead to better outcomes. Several socio-demographic properties have been identified as strongly connected with both cancer's clinical dynamics and (indirectly) with different individual check-up behaviors. Unfortunately, existing check-up policies typically consider only the former association explicitly. In this work, we propose a novel framework, accompanied by a high-resolution computer simulation, to investigate and optimize socio-demographic-based SMS reminder campaigns for cancer check-ups. We instantiate our framework and simulation for the case of bladder cancer, the 10th most prevalent cancer today, using extensive real-world data. Our results indicate that optimizing an SMS reminder campaign based solely on simple socio-demographic features can bring about a statistically significant reduction in mortality rate compared to alternative campaigns by up to 5.8%.

翻译：及时进行诊断前后的检查对所有癌症类型的患者都至关重要，因为这通常能带来更好的治疗效果。多项社会人口学特征已被证实与癌症的临床动态以及（间接地）个体不同的检查行为密切相关。遗憾的是，现有的检查政策通常仅明确考虑前者关联。本研究提出了一种新颖框架，并辅以高分辨率计算机模拟，用于探索和优化基于社会人口学特征的癌症检查短信提醒活动。我们利用大量真实世界数据，针对当今第十大常见癌症——膀胱癌——对框架和模拟进行了实例化。结果表明，仅基于简单社会人口学特征优化短信提醒活动，相比其他活动，可将死亡率统计显著降低高达5.8%。