Performance of machine learning techniques on prediction of esophageal varices grades among patients with cirrhosis

All patients with cirrhosis should be periodically examined for esophageal varices (EV), however, a large percentage of patients undergoing screening, do not have EV or have only mild EV and do not have high-risk characteristics. Therefore, developing a non-invasive method to predict the occurrence of EV in patients with liver cirrhosis as a non-invasive method with high accuracy seems useful. In the present research, we compared the performance of several machine learning (ML) methods to predict EV on laboratory and clinical data to choose the best model.

Four-hundred-and-ninety data from the Liver and Gastroenterology Research Center of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in the period 2014-2021, were analyzed applying models including random forest (RF), artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), and logistic regression.

RF and SVM had the best results in general for all grades of EV. RF showed remarkably better results and the highest area under the curve (AUC). After that, SVM and ANN had the AUC of 98%, for grade 3, the SVM algorithm had the highest AUC after RF (89%).

The findings may help to better predict EV with high precision and accuracy and also can help reduce the burden of frequent visits to endoscopic centers. It can also help practitioners to manage cirrhosis by predicting EV with lower costs.