Developing and validating a clinlabomics-based machine-learning model for early detection of retinal detachment in patients with high myopia

Abstract

Background

Retinal detachment (RD) is a vision-threatening disorder of significant severity. Individuals with high myopia (HM) face a 2 to 6 times higher risk of developing RD compared to non-myopes. The timely identification of high myopia-related retinal detachment (HMRD) is crucial for effective treatment and prevention of additional vision impairment. Consequently, our objective was to streamline and validate a machine-learning model based on clinical laboratory omics (clinlabomics) for the early detection of RD in HM patients.

Methods

We extracted clinlabomics data from the electronic health records for 24,440 HM and 5607 HMRD between 2015 and 2022. Lasso regression analysis assessed fifty-nine variables, excluding collinear variables (variance inflation factor > 10). Four models based on random forest, gradient boosting machine (GBM), generalized linear model, and Deep Learning Model were trained for HMRD diagnosis and employed for internal validation. An external test of the models was done. Three random data sets were further processed to validate the performance of the diagnostic model. The primary outcomes were the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and the area under the precision-recall curve (AUCPR) to diagnose HMRD.

Results

Nine variables were selected by all models. Given the AUC and AUCPR values across the different sets, the GBM model was chosen as the final diagnostic model. The GBM model had an AUC of 0.8550 (95%CI = 0.8322–0.8967) and an AUCPR of 0.5584 (95%CI = 0.5250–0.5879) in the training set. The AUC and AUCPR in the internal validation were 0.8405 (95%CI = 0.8060–0.8966) and 0.5355 (95%CI = 0.4988–0.5732). During the external test evaluation, it reached an AUC of 0.7579 (95%CI = 0.7340–0.7840) and an AUCPR of 0.5587 (95%CI = 0.5345–0.5880). A similar discriminative capacity was observed in the three random data sets. The GBM model was well-calibrated across all the sets. The GBM-RD model was implemented into a web application that provides risk prediction for HM individuals.

Conclusion

GBM algorithms based on nine features successfully predicted the diagnosis of RD in patients with HM, which will help ophthalmologists to establish a preliminary diagnosis and to improve diagnostic accuracy in the clinic.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12967-024-05131-9.