Cardiomyopathy Diagnosis Model from Endomyocardial Biopsy Specimens: Appropriate Feature Space and Class Boundary in Small Sample Size Data

As the number of patients with heart failure increases, machine learning (ML) has garnered attention in cardiomyopathy diagnosis, driven by the shortage of pathologists. However, endomyocardial biopsy specimens are often small sample size and require techniques such as feature extraction and dimensionality reduction. This study aims to determine whether texture features are effective for feature extraction in the pathological diagnosis of cardiomyopathy. Furthermore, model designs that contribute toward improving generalization performance are examined by applying feature selection (FS) and dimensional compression (DC) to several ML models. The obtained results were verified by visualizing the inter-class distribution differences and conducting statistical hypothesis testing based on texture features. Additionally, they were evaluated using predictive performance across different model designs with varying combinations of FS and DC (applied or not) and decision boundaries. The obtained results confirmed that texture features may be effective for the pathological diagnosis of cardiomyopathy. Moreover, when the ratio of features to the sample size is high, a multi-step process involving FS and DC improved the generalization performance, with the linear kernel support vector machine achieving the best results. This process was demonstrated to be potentially effective for models with reduced complexity, regardless of whether the decision boundaries were linear, curved, perpendicular, or parallel to the axes. These findings are expected to facilitate the development of an effective cardiomyopathy diagnostic model for its rapid adoption in medical practice.

Multi-rules mining algorithm for combinatorially exploded decision trees with modified Aitchison-Aitken function-based Bayesian optimization

Decision trees offer the benefit of easy interpretation because they allow the classification of input data based on if--then rules. However, as decision trees are constructed by an algorithm that achieves clear classification with minimum necessary rules, the trees possess the drawback of extracting only minimum rules, even when various latent rules exist in data. Approaches that construct multiple trees using randomly selected feature subsets do exist. However, the number of trees that can be constructed remains at the same scale because the number of feature subsets is a combinatorial explosion. Additionally, when multiple trees are constructed, numerous rules are generated, of which several are untrustworthy and/or highly similar. Therefore, we propose "MAABO-MT" and "GS-MRM" algorithms that strategically construct trees with high estimation performance among all possible trees with small computational complexity and extract only reliable and non-similar rules, respectively. Experiments are conducted using several open datasets to analyze the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results confirm that MAABO-MT can discover reliable rules at a lower computational cost than other methods that rely on randomness. Furthermore, the proposed method is confirmed to provide deeper insights than single decision trees commonly used in previous studies. Therefore, MAABO-MT and GS-MRM can efficiently extract rules from combinatorially exploded decision trees.