This study reviews the recent progress of machine learning for the early diagnosis of thyroid disease. Based on the results of this review, different machine learning methods would be appropriate for different types of data for the early diagnosis of thyroid disease: (1) the random forest and gradient boosting in the case of numeric data; (2) the random forest in the case of genomic data; (3) the random forest and the ensemble in the case of radiomic data; and (4) the random forest in the case of ultrasound data. Their performance measures varied within 64.3-99.5 for accuracy, 66.8-90.1 for sensitivity, 61.8-85.5 for specificity, and 64.0-96.9 for the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. According to the findings of this review, indeed, the following attributes would be important variables for the early diagnosis of thyroid disease: clinical stage, marital status, histological type, age, nerve injury symptom, economic income, surgery type [the quality of life 3 months after thyroid cancer surgery]; tumor diameter, symptoms, extrathyroidal extension [the local recurrence of differentiated thyroid carcinoma]; RNA feasures including ADD3-AS1 (downregulation), MIR100HG (downregulation), FAM95C (downregulation), MORC2-AS1 (downregulation), LINC00506 (downregulation), ST7-AS1 (downregulation), LOC339059 (downregulation), MIR181A2HG (upregulation), FAM181A-AS1 (downregulation), LBX2-AS1 (upregulation), BLACAT1 (upregulation), hsa-miR-9-5p (downregulation), hsa-miR-146b-3p (upregulation), hsa-miR-199b-5p (downregulation), hsa-miR-4709-3p (upregulation), hsa-miR-34a-5p (upregulation), hsa-miR-214-3p (downregulation) [papillary thyroid carcinoma]; gut microbiota RNA features such as veillonella, paraprevotella, neisseria, rheinheimera [hypothyroidism]; and ultrasound features, i.e., wreath-shaped feature, micro-calcification, strain ratio [the malignancy of thyroid nodules].
Keywords: early diagnosis; machine learning; random forest; review; thyroid.
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by IMR Press.