Machine Learning Detects Symptomatic Plaques in Patients With Carotid Atherosclerosis on CT Angiography

This study aimed to develop and validate a computed tomography angiography based machine learning model that uses plaque composition data and degree of carotid stenosis to detect symptomatic carotid plaques in patients with carotid atherosclerosis.

The machine learning based model was trained using degree of stenosis and the volumes of 13 computed tomography angiography derived intracarotid plaque subcomponents (eg, lipid, intraplaque hemorrhage, calcium) to identify plaques associated with cerebrovascular events. The model was internally validated through repeated 10-fold cross-validation and tested on a dedicated testing cohort according to discrimination and calibration.

This retrospective, single-center study evaluated computed tomography angiography scans of 268 patients with both symptomatic and asymptomatic carotid atherosclerosis (163 for the derivation set and 106 for the testing set) performed between March 2013 and October 2019. The area-under-receiver-operating characteristics curve by machine learning on the testing cohort (0.89) was significantly higher than the areas under the curve of traditional logit analysis based on the degree of stenosis (0.51, P<0.001), presence of intraplaque hemorrhage (0.69, P<0.001), and plaque composition (0.78, P<0.001), respectively. Comparable performance was obtained on internal validation. The identified plaque components and associated cutoff values that were significantly associated with a higher likelihood of symptomatic status after adjustment were the ratio of intraplaque hemorrhage to lipid volume (≥50%, 38.5 [10.1-205.1]; odds ratio, 95% CI) and percentage of intraplaque hemorrhage volume (≥10%, 18.5 [5.7-69.4]; odds ratio, 95% CI).

This study presented an interpretable machine learning model that accurately identifies symptomatic carotid plaques using computed tomography angiography derived plaque composition features, aiding clinical decision-making.