Predicting temporomandibular disorders in adults using interpretable machine learning methods: a model development and validation study

Temporomandibular disorders (TMD) have a high prevalence and complex etiology. The purpose of this study was to apply a machine learning (ML) approach to identify risk factors for the occurrence of TMD in adults and to develop and validate an interpretable predictive model for the risk of TMD in adults.

A total of 949 adults who underwent oral examinations were enrolled in our study. 5 different ML algorithms were used for model development and comparison, and feature selection was performed by feature importance ranking and feature decreasing methods. Several evaluation indexes, including the area under the receiver-operating-characteristic curve (AUC), were used to compare the predictive performance. The precision-recall curve (PR), calibration curve, and decision curve analysis (DCA) further assessed the accuracy and clinical utility of the model.

The performance of the random forest (RF) model was the best among the 5 ML models. An interpretable RF model was developed with 7 features (gender, malocclusion, unilateral chewing, chewing hard substances, grinding teeth, clenching teeth, and anxiety). The AUCs of the final model on the training set, internal validation set, and external test set were 0.892, 0.854, and 0.857, respectively. Calibration and DCA curves showed high accuracy and clinical applicability of the model.

An efficient and interpretable TMD risk prediction model for adults was successfully developed using the ML method. The model not only has good predictive performance, but also enhances the clinical application value of the model through the SHAP method. This model can provide clinicians with a practical and efficient TMD risk assessment tool that can help them better predict and assess TMD risk in adults, supporting more efficient disease management and targeted medical interventions.