Early detection of ankylosing spondylitis using texture features and statistical machine learning, and deep learning, with some patient age analysis

Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is an arthritis with symptoms visible in medical imagery. This paper proposes, to the authors’ best knowledge, the first use of statistical machine learning- and deep learning-based classifiers to detect erosion, an early AS symptom, via analysis of computed tomography (CT) imagery, giving some consideration to patient age in so doing. We used gray-level co-occurrence matrices and local binary patterns to generate input features to machine learning algorithms, specifically k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) and random forest. Deep learning solutions based on a modified InceptionV3 architecture were designed and tested, with one classifier produced by training with a cross-entropy loss function and another produced by additionally seeking to minimize validation loss. We found that the random forest classifiers outperform the k-NN classifiers and achieve an eightfold cross-validation average accuracy, recall, and area under receiver operator characteristic curve (ROC AUC) of 96.0%, 92.9%, and 0.97, respectively, for erosion vs. young control patients, and 82.4%, 80.6%, and 0.91, respectively, for erosion vs. old control patients. We found that the deep learning classifier trained without minimizing validation loss was best and achieves an eightfold cross-validation accuracy, recall, and ROC AUC of 99.0%, 97.5%, and 0.97, respectively, for erosion vs. all (combined young and old) control patients; this classifier outperforms a musculoskeletal radiologist with 9 years of experience in raw sensitivity and specificity by 8.4% and 9.5%, respectively. Despite the relatively small dataset on which we trained and cross-validated, our results indicate the potential of machine and deep learning to aid AS diagnosis, and further research using larger datasets should be conducted.