Use of Artificial Intelligence in the Prediction of Chiari Malformation Type 1 Recurrence After Posterior Fossa Decompressive Surgery

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to train a deep learning-based method for the prediction of postoperative recurrence of symptoms in Chiari malformation type 1 (CM1) patients undergoing surgery. Studies suggest that certain radiological and clinical features do exist in patients with treatment failure, though these are inconsistent and poorly defined.

Methodology

This study was a retrospective cohort study of patients who underwent primary surgical intervention for CM1 from January 2010 to May 2020. Only patients who completed pre- and postoperative 12-item short form (SF-12) surveys were included and these were used to classify the recurrence or persistence of symptoms. Forty patients had an improvement in overall symptoms while 17 had recurrence or persistence. After magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data augmentation, a ResNet50, pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset, was used for feature extraction, and then clustering-constrained attention multiple instance learning (CLAM), a weakly supervised multi-instance learning framework, was trained for prediction of recurrence. Five-fold cross-validation was used for the development of MRI only, clinical features only, and a combined machine learning model.

Results

This study included 57 patients who underwent CM1 decompression. The recurrence rate was 30%. The combined model incorporating MRI, pre-operative SF-12 physical component scale (PCS), and extent of cerebellar ectopia performed best with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.71 and an F1 score of 0.74.

Conclusion

This is the first study to our knowledge to explore the prediction of postoperative recurrence of symptoms in CM1 patients using machine learning methods and represents the first step toward developing a clinically useful prognostication machine learning model. Further studies utilizing a similar deep learning approach with a larger sample size are needed to improve the performance.