Metabolic syndrome (MetS) includes several conditions that can increase an individual's predisposition to high-risk cardiovascular events, morbidity, and mortality. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a predominant cause of cirrhosis, which is a global indicator of liver transplantation and is considered the hepatic manifestation of MetS. FibroScan® provides an accurate and non-invasive method for assessing liver steatosis and fibrosis in patients with NAFLD, via a controlled attenuation parameter (CAP) and liver stiffness measurement (LSM or E) scores and has been widely used in current clinical practice. Several machine learning (ML) models with a recursive feature elimination (RFE) algorithm were applied to evaluate the importance of the CAP score. Analysis by ANOVA revealed that five symptoms at different CAP and E score levels were significant. All eight ML models had accuracy scores > 0.9, while treebags and random forest had the best kappa values (0.6439 and 0.6533, respectively). The CAP score was the most important variable in the seven ML models. Machine learning models with RFE demonstrated that using the CAP score to identify patients with MetS may be feasible. Thus, a combination of CAP scores and other significant biomarkers could be used for early detection in predicting MetS.
Keywords: controlled attenuation parameter; liver steatosis; liver stiffness measurement; machine learning; metabolic syndrome; non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.