Osteoarthritis is a chronic disease that affects the temporomandibular joint (TMJ), causing chronic pain and disability. To diagnose patients suffering from this disease before advanced degradation of the bone, we developed a diagnostic tool called TMJOAI. This machine learning based algorithm is capable of classifying the health status TMJ in of patients using 52 clinical, biological and jaw condyle radiomic markers. The TMJOAI includes three parts. the feature preparation, selection and model evaluation. Feature generation includes the choice of radiomic features (condylar trabecular bone or mandibular fossa), the histogram matching of the images prior to the extraction of the radiomic markers, the generation of feature pairwise interaction, etc.; the feature selection are based on the p-values or AUCs of single features using the training data; the model evaluation compares multiple machine learning algorithms (e.g. regression-based, tree-based and boosting algorithms) from 10 times 5-fold cross validation. The best performance was achieved with averaging the predictions of XGBoost and LightGBM models; and the inclusion of 32 additional markers from the mandibular fossa of the joint improved the AUC prediction performance from 0.83 to 0.88. After cross-validation and testing, the tools presented here have been deployed on an open-source, web-based system, making it accessible to clinicians. TMJOAI allows users to add data and automatically train and update the machine learning models, and therefore improve their performance.
Keywords: Early diagnosis; Machine learning; Osteoarthritis.