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There is a significant discrepancy between the actual choice for initial treatment option for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and recommendations from the currently used BCLC staging system. We develop a machine learning-based clinical decision support system (CDSS) for recommending initial treatment option in HCC and predicting overall survival (OS). From hospital records of 1,021 consecutive patients with HCC treated at a single centre in Korea between January 2010 and October 2010, we collected information on 61 pretreatment variables, initial treatment, and survival status. Twenty pretreatment key variables were finally selected. We developed the CDSS from the derivation set (N = 813) using random forest method and validated it in the validation set (N = 208). Among the 1,021 patients (mean age: 56.9 years), 81.8% were male and 77.0% had positive hepatitis B BCLC stages 0, A, B, C, and D were observed in 13.4%, 26.0%, 18.0%, 36.6%, and 6.3% of patients, respectively. The six multi-step classifier model was developed for treatment decision in a hierarchical manner, and showed good performance with 81.0% of accuracy for radiofrequency ablation (RFA) or resection versus not, 88.4% for RFA versus resection, and 76.8% for TACE or not. We also developed seven survival prediction models for each treatment option. Our newly developed HCC-CDSS model showed good performance in terms of treatment recommendation and OS prediction and may be used as a guidance in deciding the initial treatment option for HCC.

Heterogeneous clinical manifestations and progression of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) affect patient health risk assessment, stratification, and management. Pulmonary function tests are used to diagnose and classify the severity of COPD, but they cannot fully represent the type or range of pathophysiologic abnormalities of the disease. To evaluate whether deep radiomics from chest computed tomography (CT) images can predict mortality in patients with COPD, we designed a convolutional neural network (CNN) model for extracting representative features from CT images and then performed random survival forest to predict survival in COPD patients. We trained CNN-based binary classifier based on six-minute walk distance results (> 440 m or not) and extracted high-throughput image features (i.e., deep radiomics) directly from the last fully connected layer of it. The various sizes of fully connected layers and combinations of deep features were experimented using a discovery cohort with 344 patients from the Korean Obstructive Lung Disease cohort and an external validation cohort with 102 patients from Penang General Hospital in Malaysia. In the integrative analysis of discovery and external validation cohorts, with combining 256 deep features from the coronal slice of the vertebral body and two sagittal slices of the left/right lung, deep radiomics for survival prediction achieved concordance indices of 0.8008 (95% CI, 0.7642–0.8373) and 0.7156 (95% CI, 0.7024–0.7288), respectively. Deep radiomics from CT images could be used to predict mortality in COPD patients.

The endoscopic features between herpes simplex virus (HSV) and cytomegalovirus (CMV) esophagitis overlap significantly, and hence the differential diagnosis between HSV and CMV esophagitis is sometimes difficult. Therefore, we developed a machine-learning-based classifier to discriminate between CMV and HSV esophagitis. We analyzed 87 patients with HSV esophagitis and 63 patients with CMV esophagitis and developed a machine-learning-based artificial intelligence (AI) system using a total of 666 endoscopic images with HSV esophagitis and 416 endoscopic images with CMV esophagitis. In the five repeated five-fold cross-validations based on the hue–saturation–brightness color model, logistic regression with a least absolute shrinkage and selection operation showed the best performance (sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, accuracy, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve: 100%, 100%, 100%, 100%, 100%, and 1.0, respectively). Previous history of transplantation was included in classifiers as a clinical factor; the lower the performance of these classifiers, the greater the effect of including this clinical factor. Our machine-learning-based AI system for differential diagnosis between HSV and CMV esophagitis showed high accuracy, which could help clinicians with diagnoses.

We investigated the ability of machine-learning classifiers on radiomics from pre-treatment multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to accurately predict human papillomavirus (HPV) status in patients with oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (OPSCC). This retrospective study collected data of 60 patients (48 HPV-positive and 12 HPV-negative) with newly diagnosed histopathologically proved OPSCC, who underwent head and neck MRIs consisting of axial T1WI, T2WI, CE-T1WI, and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps from diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI). The median age was 59 years (the range being 35 to 85 years), and 83.3% of patients were male. The imaging data were randomised into a training set (32 HPV-positive and 8 HPV-negative OPSCC) and a test set (16 HPV-positive and 4 HPV-negative OPSCC) in each fold. 1618 quantitative features were extracted from manually delineated regions-of-interest of primary tumour and one definite lymph node in each sequence. After feature selection by using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), three different machine-learning classifiers (logistic regression, random forest, and XG boost) were trained and compared in the setting of various combinations between four sequences. The highest diagnostic accuracies were achieved when using all sequences, and the difference was significant only when the combination did not include the ADC map. Using all sequences, logistic regression and the random forest classifier yielded higher accuracy compared with the that of the XG boost classifier, with mean area under curve (AUC) values of 0.77, 0.76, and 0.71, respectively. The machine-learning classifier of non-invasive and quantitative radiomics signature could guide the classification of the HPV status.

We aimed to establish a high-performing and robust classification strategy, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), along with combinations of feature extraction and selection in human and machine learning using radiomics or deep features by employing a small dataset. Using diffusion and contrast-enhanced T1-weighted MR images obtained from patients with glioblastomas and primary central nervous system lymphomas, classification task was assigned to a combination of radiomic features and (1) supervised machine learning after feature selection or (2) multilayer perceptron (MLP) network; or MR image input without radiomic feature extraction to (3) two neuro-radiologists or (4) an end-to-end convolutional neural network (CNN). The results showed similar high performance in generalized linear model (GLM) classifier and MLP using radiomics features in the internal validation set, but MLP network remained robust in the external validation set obtained using different MRI protocols. CNN showed the lowest performance in both validation sets. Our results reveal that a combination of radiomic features and MLP network classifier serves a high-performing and generalizable model for classification task for a small dataset with heterogeneous MRI protocols.