Exploring the Feasibility of Applying Deep Learning for the Early Prediction of Arthritis

Introduction: Arthritis is one of the most common chronic diseases. Early detection of arthritis and its progression can facilitate early intervention measures, lowering disease severity in patients. As electronic health records (EHR) become more accessible, this study assesses whether general health information and arthritis-related questionnaires can be used in arthritis diagnosis, without the involvement of costly imaging methods. Therefore, we created deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) models to explore the feasibility of combining EHR and modern computational tools to diagnose arthritis. Methods: A total of 782 arthritis patients and 4014 control patients were identified from the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) – a ten-year-long observational study that included patient EHR in five time points. Six hundred variables were filtered by random forest classifier followed by manual filtering. Data were split properly to training, testing and validation set, and the training set was balanced. Sequential, nonsequential DL models, and five independent DL models for each time points were used. The accuracy, positive prevalence value (PPV), negative prevalence value (NPV), and area under curve (AUC), were assessed and compared with four classical ML models. SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) summary analysis was also conducted. Results: Sequential and non-sequential deep learning models showed accuracies of ~ 0.97, and the four classical machine learning approaches showed accuracies of above 0.9. High positive and negative predicted values (> 0.90) for all of the models suggested the potential clinical applicability of the model, while the SHAP analysis demonstrated its interpretability. Discussion: We tested various models and showed the ability to use machine learning methods for early diagnosis of arthritis with EHR. The models can be used as a screening tool to select susceptible patients for confirmatory tests such as X-ray and MRI. Identification of early disease states could facilitate protective measures that slow disease progression.