Time-Dependent Deep Learning Prediction of Multiple Sclerosis Disability

The majority of deep learning models in medical image analysis concentrate on single snapshot timepoint circumstances, such as the identification of current pathology on a given image or volume. This is often in contrast to the diagnostic methodology in radiology where presumed pathologic findings are correlated to prior studies and subsequent changes over time. For multiple sclerosis (MS), the current body of literature describes various forms of lesion segmentation with few studies analyzing disability progression over time. For the purpose of longitudinal time-dependent analysis, we propose a combinatorial analysis of a video vision transformer (ViViT) benchmarked against traditional recurrent neural network of Convolutional Neural Network-Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) architectures and a hybrid Vision Transformer-LSTM (ViT-LSTM) to predict long-term disability based upon the Extended Disability Severity Score (EDSS). The patient cohort was procured from a two-site institution with 703 patients' multisequence, contrast-enhanced MRIs of the cervical spine between the years 2002 and 2023. Following a competitive performance analysis, a VGG-16-based CNN-LSTM was compared to ViViT with an ablation analysis to determine time-dependency of the models. The VGG16-LSTM predicted trinary classification of EDSS score in 6 years with 0.74 AUC versus the ViViT with 0.84 AUC (p-value < 0.001 per 5 × 2 cross-validation F-test) on an 80:20 hold-out testing split. However, the VGG16-LSTM outperformed ViViT when patients with only 2 years of MRIs (n = 94) (0.75 AUC versus 0.72 AUC, respectively). Exact EDSS classification was investigated for both models using both classification and regression strategies but showed collectively worse performance. Our experimental results demonstrate the ability of time-dependent deep learning models to predict disability in MS using trinary stratification of disability, mimicking clinical practice. Further work includes external validation and subsequent observational clinical trials.