Using Blood Indexes to Predict Overweight Statuses: An Extreme Learning Machine-Based Approach

Machine learning allows robust classification of visceral fat in women with obesity using common laboratory metrics

The excessive accumulation and malfunctioning of visceral adipose tissue (VAT) is a major determinant of increased risk of obesity-related comorbidities. Thus, risk stratification of people living with obesity according to their amount of VAT is of clinical interest. Currently, the most common VAT measurement methods include mathematical formulae based on anthropometric dimensions, often biased by human measurement errors, bio-impedance, and image techniques such as X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) analysis, which requires specialized equipment. However, previous studies showed the possibility of classifying people living with obesity according to their VAT through blood chemical concentrations by applying machine learning techniques. In addition, most of the efforts were spent on men living with obesity while little was done for women. Therefore, this study aims to compare the performance of the multilinear regression model (MLR) in estimating VAT and six different supervised machine learning classifiers, including logistic regression (LR), support vector machine and decision tree-based models, to categorize 149 women living with obesity. For clustering, the study population was categorized into classes 0, 1, and 2 according to their VAT and the accuracy of each MLR and classification model was evaluated using DXA-data (DXAdata), blood chemical concentrations (BLDdata), and both DXAdata and BLDdata together (ALLdata). Estimation error and R 2 were computed for MLR, while receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and precision-recall curves (PR) area under the curve (AUC) were used to assess the performance of every classification model. MLR models showed a poor ability to estimate VAT with mean absolute error ≥ 401.40 andR 2 ≤ 0.62 in all the datasets. The highest accuracy was found for LR with values of 0.57, 0.63, and 0.53 for ALLdata, DXAdata, and BLDdata, respectively. The ROC AUC showed a poor ability of both ALLdata and DXAdata to distinguish class 1 from classes 0 and 2 (AUC = 0.31, 0.71, and 0.85, respectively) as also confirmed by PR (AUC = 0.24, 0.57, and 0.73, respectively). However, improved performances were obtained when applying LR model to BLDdata (ROC AUC ≥ 0.61 and PR AUC ≥ 0.42), especially for class 1. These results seem to suggest that, while a direct and reliable estimation of VAT was not possible in our cohort, blood sample-derived information can robustly classify women living with obesity by machine learning-based classifiers, a fact that could benefit the clinical practice, especially in those health centres where medical imaging devices are not available. Nonetheless, these promising findings should be further validated over a larger population.

Identification of influence factors in overweight population through an interpretable risk model based on machine learning: a large retrospective cohort

BACKGROUND

The identification of associated overweight risk factors is crucial to future health risk predictions and behavioral interventions. Several consensus problems remain in machine learning, such as cross-validation, and the resulting model may suffer from overfitting or poor interpretability.

METHODS

This study employed nine commonly used machine learning methods to construct overweight risk models. The general community are the target of this study, and a total of 10,905 Chinese subjects from Ningde City in Fujian province, southeast China, participated. The best model was selected through appropriate verification and validation and was suitably explained.

RESULTS

The overweight risk models employing machine learning exhibited good performance. It was concluded that CatBoost, which is used in the construction of clinical risk models, may surpass previous machine learning methods. The visual display of the Shapley additive explanation value for the machine model variables accurately represented the influence of each variable in the model.

CONCLUSIONS

The construction of an overweight risk model using machine learning may currently be the best approach. Moreover, CatBoost may be the best machine learning method. Furthermore, combining Shapley's additive explanation and machine learning methods can be effective in identifying disease risk factors for prevention and control.

Applications of Artificial Intelligence to Obesity Research: Scoping Review of Methodologies

BACKGROUND

Obesity is a leading cause of preventable death worldwide. Artificial intelligence (AI), characterized by machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL), has become an indispensable tool in obesity research.

OBJECTIVE

This scoping review aimed to provide researchers and practitioners with an overview of the AI applications to obesity research, familiarize them with popular ML and DL models, and facilitate the adoption of AI applications.

METHODS

We conducted a scoping review in PubMed and Web of Science on the applications of AI to measure, predict, and treat obesity. We summarized and categorized the AI methodologies used in the hope of identifying synergies, patterns, and trends to inform future investigations. We also provided a high-level, beginner-friendly introduction to the core methodologies to facilitate the dissemination and adoption of various AI techniques.

RESULTS

We identified 46 studies that used diverse ML and DL models to assess obesity-related outcomes. The studies found AI models helpful in detecting clinically meaningful patterns of obesity or relationships between specific covariates and weight outcomes. The majority (18/22, 82%) of the studies comparing AI models with conventional statistical approaches found that the AI models achieved higher prediction accuracy on test data. Some (5/46, 11%) of the studies comparing the performances of different AI models revealed mixed results, indicating the high contingency of model performance on the data set and task it was applied to. An accelerating trend of adopting state-of-the-art DL models over standard ML models was observed to address challenging computer vision and natural language processing tasks. We concisely introduced the popular ML and DL models and summarized their specific applications in the studies included in the review.

CONCLUSIONS

This study reviewed AI-related methodologies adopted in the obesity literature, particularly ML and DL models applied to tabular, image, and text data. The review also discussed emerging trends such as multimodal or multitask AI models, synthetic data generation, and human-in-the-loop that may witness increasing applications in obesity research.

Construction of Predictive Model for Type 2 Diabetic Retinopathy Based on Extreme Learning Machine

PURPOSE

The common cause of blindness in people with type 2 diabetes (T2D) is diabetic retinopathy (DR). Early fundus examinations have been shown to prevent vision loss, but routine ophthalmic screenings for patients with diabetes present significant financial and material challenges to existing health-care systems. The purpose of this study is to build a DR prediction model based on the extreme learning machine (ELM) and to compare the performance with the DR prediction models based on support machine vector (SVM), K proximity (KNN), random forest (RF) and artificial neural network (ANN).

METHODS

From January 1, 2020 to November 31, 2021, data were collected from electronic inpatient medical records at Lu'an Hospital of Anhui Medical University in China. An extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm was used to develop a prediction model based on demographic data and blood testing and urine test results. Several metrics were used to evaluate the model's performance: (1) classification accuracy (ACC), (2) sensitivity, (3) specificity, (4) Precision,(5) Negative predictive value (NPV), (6) Training time and (7) area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC).

RESULTS

In terms of ACC, Sensitivity, Specificity, Precision, NPV and AUC, DR prediction model based on SVM and ELM is better than DR prediction model based on ANN, KNN and RF. The prediction model for diabetic retinopathy based on elm is the best among them in terms of ACC, Precision, Specificity, Training time and AUC, with 84.45%, 83.93%, 93.16%,1.24s, and 88.34%, respectively. The DR prediction model based on SVM is the best in terms of sensitivity and NPV, which are, respectively, 70.82% and 85.60%.

CONCLUSION

According to the findings of this study, the model based on the extreme learning machine presents an outstanding performance in predicting diabetic retinopathy thus providing technological assistance for screening of diabetic retinopathy.

Predicting obesity and smoking using medication data: A machine-learning approach

PURPOSE

Administrative health datasets are widely used in public health research but often lack information about common confounders. We aimed to develop and validate machine learning (ML)-based models using medication data from Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) database to predict obesity and smoking.

METHODS

We used data from the D-Health Trial (N = 18 000) and the QSkin Study (N = 43 794). Smoking history, and height and weight were self-reported at study entry. Linkage to the PBS dataset captured 5 years of medication data after cohort entry. We used age, sex, and medication use, classified using anatomical therapeutic classification codes, as potential predictors of smoking (current or quit <10 years ago; never or quit ≥10 years ago) and obesity (obese; non-obese). We trained gradient-boosted machine learning models using data for the first 80% of participants enrolled; models were validated using the remaining 20%. We assessed model performance overall and by sex and age, and compared models generated using 3 and 5 years of PBS data.

RESULTS

Based on the validation dataset using 3 years of PBS data, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.70 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.68-0.71) for predicting obesity and 0.71 (95% CI 0.70-0.72) for predicting smoking. Models performed better in women than in men. Using 5 years of PBS data resulted in marginal improvement.

CONCLUSIONS

Medication data in combination with age and sex can be used to predict obesity and smoking. These models may be of value to researchers using data collected for administrative purposes.

The Prediction of Body Mass Index from Negative Affectivity through Machine Learning: A Confirmatory Study

This study investigates on the relationship between affect-related psychological variables and Body Mass Index (BMI). We have utilized a novel method based on machine learning (ML) algorithms that forecast unobserved BMI values based on psychological variables, like depression, as predictors. We have employed various machine learning algorithms, including gradient boosting and random forest, with psychological variables relative to 221 subjects to predict both the BMI values and the BMI status (normal, overweight, and obese) of those subjects. We have found that the psychological variables in use allow one to predict both the BMI values (with a mean absolute error of 5.27-5.50) and the BMI status with an accuracy of over 80% (metric: F1-score). Further, our study has also confirmed the particular efficacy of psychological variables of negative type, such as depression for example, compared to positive ones, to achieve excellent predictive BMI values.

Diagnosing Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): Efficient Harris Hawks-Inspired Fuzzy K-Nearest Neighbor Prediction Methods

This study is devoted to proposing a useful intelligent prediction model to distinguish the severity of COVID-19, to provide a more fair and reasonable reference for assisting clinical diagnostic decision-making. Based on patients' necessary information, pre-existing diseases, symptoms, immune indexes, and complications, this article proposes a prediction model using the Harris hawks optimization (HHO) to optimize the Fuzzy K-nearest neighbor (FKNN), which is called HHO-FKNN. This model is utilized to distinguish the severity of COVID-19. In HHO-FKNN, the purpose of introducing HHO is to optimize the FKNN's optimal parameters and feature subsets simultaneously. Also, based on actual COVID-19 data, we conducted a comparative experiment between HHO-FKNN and several well-known machine learning algorithms, which result shows that not only the proposed HHO-FKNN can obtain better classification performance and higher stability on the four indexes but also screen out the key features that distinguish severe COVID-19 from mild COVID-19. Therefore, we can conclude that the proposed HHO-FKNN model is expected to become a useful tool for COVID-19 prediction.

Prediction for the Risk of Multiple Chronic Conditions Among Working Population in the United States With Machine Learning Models

Objective: Chronic diseases have become the most prevalent and costly health conditions in the healthcare industry, deteriorating the quality of life, adversely affecting the work productivity, and costing astounding medical resources. However, few studies have been conducted on the predictive analysis of multiple chronic conditions (MCC) based on the working population. Results: Seven machine learning algorithms are used to support the decision making of healthcare practitioner on the risk of MCC. The models were developed and validated using checkup data from 451,425 working population collected by the healthcare providers. Our result shows that all proposed models achieved satisfactory performance, with the AUC values ranging from 0.826 to 0.850. Among the seven predictive models, the gradient boosting tree model outperformed other models, achieving an AUC of 0.850. Conclusions: Our risk prediction model shows great promise in automating real-time diagnosis, supporting healthcare practitioners to target high-risk individuals efficiently, and helping healthcare practitioners tailor proactive strategies to prevent the onset or delay the progression of the chronic diseases.

Predicting Coronary Atherosclerotic Heart Disease: An Extreme Learning Machine with Improved Salp Swarm Algorithm

To provide an available diagnostic model for diagnosing coronary atherosclerotic heart disease to provide an auxiliary function for doctors, we proposed a new evolutionary classification model in this paper. The core of the prediction model is a kernel extreme learning machine (KELM) optimized by an improved salp swarm algorithm (SSA). To get a better subset of parameters and features, the space transformation mechanism is introduced in the optimization core to improve SSA for obtaining an optimal KELM model. The KELM model for the diagnosis of coronary atherosclerotic heart disease (STSSA-KELM) is developed based on the optimal parameters and a subset of features. In the experiment, STSSA-KELM is compared with some widely adopted machine learning methods (MLM) in coronary atherosclerotic heart disease prediction. The experimental results show that STSSA-KELM can realize excellent classification performance and more robust stability under four indications. We also compare the convergence of STSSA-KELM with other MLM; the STSSA-KELM model has demonstrated a higher classification performance. Therefore, the STSSA-KELM model can effectively help doctors to diagnose coronary heart disease.

Machine learning and blood pressure

Machine learning (ML) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) based on pattern recognition. There are different forms of supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms that are being used to identify and predict blood pressure (BP) and other measures of cardiovascular risk. Since 1999, starting with neural network methods, ML has been used to gauge the relationship between BP and pulse wave forms. Since then, the scope of the research has expanded to using different cardiometabolic risk factors like BMI, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio in concert with BP and its various pharmaceutical agents to estimate biochemical measures (like HDL cholesterol, LDL and total cholesterol, fibrinogen, and uric acid) as well as effectiveness of anti-hypertensive regimens. Data from large clinical trials like the SPRINT are being re-analyzed by ML methods to unearth new findings and identify unique relationships between predictors and outcomes. In summary, AI and ML methods are gaining immense attention in the management of chronic disease. Elevated BP is a very important early metric for the risk of development of cardiovascular and renal injury; therefore, advances in AI and ML will aid in early disease prediction and intervention.

Metabolomics Analysis in Acute Paraquat Poisoning Patients Based on UPLC-Q-TOF-MS and Machine Learning Approach

Most paraquat (PQ) poisoned patients died from acute multiple organ failure (MOF) such as lung, kidney, and heart. However, the exact mechanism of intoxication is still unclear. In order to find out the initial toxic mechanism of PQ poisoning, a blood metabolomics study based on ultraperformance liquid chromatography coupled to quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UPLC-Q-TOF-MS) and efficient machine learning approach was performed on 23 PQ poisoned patients and 29 healthy subjects. The initial PQ plasma concentrations of PQ poisoned patients were >1000 ng/mL, and the blood samples were collected at before first hemoperfusion (HP), after first HP, and after last HP. The results showed that PQ poisoned patients all differed from healthy subjects, whatever they were before or after first HP or after last HP. The efficient machine learning approaches selected key metabolites from three UPLC/Q-TOF-MS data sets which had the highest classification performance in terms of classification accuracy, Matthews Correlation Coefficients, sensitivity, and specificity, respectively. The mass identification revealed that the most important metabolite was adenosine, which sustained in low level, regardless of whether PQ poisoned patients received HP treatment. In conclusion, decreased adenosine was the most important metabolite in PQ poisoned patients. The metabolic disturbance caused by PQ poisoning cannot be improved by HP treatment even the PQ was cleared from the blood.

A new machine-learning method to prognosticate paraquat poisoned patients by combining coagulation, liver, and kidney indices

The prognosis of paraquat (PQ) poisoning is highly correlated to plasma PQ concentration, which has been identified as the most important index in PQ poisoning. This study investigated the predictive value of coagulation, liver, and kidney indices in prognosticating PQ-poisoning patients, when aligned with plasma PQ concentrations. Coagulation, liver, and kidney indices were first analyzed by variance analysis, receiver operating characteristic curves, and Fisher discriminant analysis. Then, a new, intelligent, machine learning-based system was established to effectively provide prognostic analysis of PQ-poisoning patients based on a combination of the aforementioned indices. In the proposed system, an enhanced extreme learning machine wrapped with a grey wolf-optimization strategy was developed to predict the risk status from a pool of 103 patients (56 males and 47 females); of these, 52 subjects were deceased and 51 alive. The proposed method was rigorously evaluated against this real-life dataset, in terms of accuracy, Matthews correlation coefficients, sensitivity, and specificity. Additionally, the feature selection was investigated to identify correlating factors for risk status. The results demonstrated that there were significant differences in the coagulation, liver, and kidney indices between deceased and surviving subjects (p<0.05). Aspartate aminotransferase, prothrombin time, prothrombin activity, total bilirubin, direct bilirubin, indirect bilirubin, alanine aminotransferase, urea nitrogen, and creatinine were the most highly correlated indices in PQ poisoning and showed statistical significance (p<0.05) in predicting PQ-poisoning prognoses. According to the feature selection, the most important correlated indices were found to be associated with aspartate aminotransferase, the aspartate aminotransferase to alanine ratio, creatinine, prothrombin time, and prothrombin activity. The method proposed here showed excellent results that were better than that produced based on blood-PQ concentration alone. These promising results indicated that the combination of these indices can provide a new avenue for prognosticating the outcome of PQ poisoning.

Correlations of Complete Blood Count with Alanine and Aspartate Transaminase in Chinese Subjects and Prediction Based on Back-Propagation Artificial Neural Network (BP-ANN)

BACKGROUND The complete blood count (CBC) is the most common examination used to monitor overall health in clinical practice. Whether there is a relationship between CBC indexes and alanine transaminase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST) has been unclear. MATERIAL AND METHODS In this study, 572 normal-weight and 346 overweight Chinese subjects were recruited. The relationship between CBC indexes with ALT and AST were analyzed by Pearson and Spearman correlations according to their sex, then we conducted colinearity diagnostics and multiple linear regression (MLR) analysis. A prediction model was developed by a back-propagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN). RESULTS ALT was related to 4 CBC indexes in the male normal-weight group and 3 CBC indexes in the female group. In the overweight group, ALT had a similar relationship with the normal group, but there was only 1 index related with AST in the normal-weight group and male overweight groups. The ALT regression models were developed in normal-weight and overweight people, which had better correlation coefficient (R>0.3). After training 1000 epochs, the BP-ANN models of ALT achieved higher correlations than MLR models in normal-weight and overweight people. CONCLUSIONS ALT is a more suitable index than AST for developing a regression model. ALT can be predicted by CBC indexes in normal-weight and overweight individuals based on a BP-ANN model, which was better than MLR analysis.

Association of blood glucose and lipid levels with complete blood count indices to establish a regression model

Hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia, which are usually diagnosed by analysis of blood glucose (GLU) and lipid levels, are two of the most common diseases in modern society. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the potential association between blood GLU and lipid levels with complete blood count (CBC) indices in overweight and healthy individuals and establish a regression model. There were 456 healthy and 421 overweight participants in the study. Data were collected on triglyceride (TG), total cholesterol (CHO), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), blood GLU and CBC. The distribution characteristics and differences between healthy and overweight subjects were analyzed. Subsequently, the associations between TG, CHO, HDL, LDL and GLU with CBC were analyzed using correlation analysis and multiple linear regression (MLR). Significant differences were identified between the healthy and overweight individuals in TG, CHO, HDL, LDL, GLU and in the majority of the CBC indices. The correlation analysis indicated that there were strong correlations between TG, LDL, HDL, CHO and GLU with CBC indices in the healthy and overweight subjects. The MLR demonstrated that the regression models of TG, LDL, HDL and CHO, but no GLU, were statistically significant in the two groups (P<0.001). The HDL regression model exhibited the best regression parameters; the multiple correlation coefficients (R) were 0.351 and 0.308 in the healthy and overweight subjects, respectively. In the overweight and healthy subjects, there were strong correlations between TG, LDL, HDL and CHO with CBC indices, with HDL being the most relevant to the CBC indices. The CBC demonstrated statistical significance in the diagnosis of hyperlipidemia.

Different medical data mining approaches based prediction of ischemic stroke

AIM

Medical data mining (also called knowledge discovery process in medicine) processes for extracting patterns from large datasets. In the current study, we intend to assess different medical data mining approaches to predict ischemic stroke.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The collected dataset from Turgut Ozal Medical Centre, Inonu University, Malatya, Turkey, comprised the medical records of 80 patients and 112 healthy individuals with 17 predictors and a target variable. As data mining approaches, support vector machine (SVM), stochastic gradient boosting (SGB) and penalized logistic regression (PLR) were employed. 10-fold cross validation resampling method was utilized, and model performance evaluation metrics were accuracy, area under ROC curve (AUC), sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value. The grid search method was used for optimizing tuning parameters of the models.

RESULTS

The accuracy values with 95% CI were 0.9789 (0.9470-0.9942) for SVM, 0.9737 (0.9397-0.9914) for SGB and 0.8947 (0.8421-0.9345) for PLR. The AUC values with 95% CI were 0.9783 (0.9569-0.9997) for SVM, 0.9757 (0.9543-0.9970) for SGB and 0.8953 (0.8510-0.9396) for PLR.

CONCLUSIONS

The results of the current study demonstrated that the SVM produced the best predictive performance compared to the other models according to the majority of evaluation metrics. SVM and SGB models explained in the current study could yield remarkable predictive performance in the classification of ischemic stroke.