Echocardiographic Texture Analysis Using Machine Learning for Predicting Myocardial Fibrosis in Hypertrophic...

This study aims to construct a low-cost echocardiographic myocardial texture-based screening model to identify patients with myocardial fibrosis and filter out non-fibrosis patients, reducing unneeded contrast use and offering an efficient screening method for resource-limited hospitals.

This study enrolled 149 patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), 105 (70%) of whom were late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) positive. Using stratified random sampling, we divided the patients into training and test sets at a 6:4 ratio. Logistic regression was subsequently used to identify clinical and echocardiographic features. Based on the radiomics score (RadScore), 10 machine learning models were constructed, and cost-sensitive learning was applied to the training set to address class imbalance, with fivefold cross-validation optimizing hyperparameters. Finally, radiomics, echocardiographic (E), and combined models were constructed using an extreme tree algorithm, and their performance was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic, calibration and decision curve analyses.

In the test set, the combined model outperformed both the radiomic and E models, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves of 0.91 (95% CI: 0.83, 0.97), a sensitivity of 0.81, a specificity of 0.83 and an F1 score of 0.85 for detecting LGE-positive patients. Calibration and decision curve analyses demonstrated good calibration for the combined model and greater net benefit than the other models did.

A machine learning model based on myocardial texture features has the potential to be a non-invasive tool for predicting myocardial fibrosis in patients with HCM and is particularly suitable for screening.