Machine learning algorithms to automate differentiating cardiac amyloidosis from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy

Cardiac amyloidosis has a poor prognosis, and high mortality and is often misdiagnosed as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, leading to delayed diagnosis. Machine learning combined with speckle tracking echocardiography was proposed to automate differentiating two conditions. A total of 74 patients with pathologically confirmed monoclonal immunoglobulin light chain cardiac amyloidosis and 64 patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy were enrolled from June 2015 to November 2018. Machine learning models utilizing traditional and advanced algorithms were established and determined the most significant predictors. The performance was evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) and the area under the curve (AUC). With clinical and echocardiography data, all models showed great discriminative performance (AUC > 0.9). Compared with logistic regression (AUC 0.91), machine learning such as support vector machine (AUC 0.95, p = 0.477), random forest (AUC 0.97, p = 0.301) and gradient boosting machine (AUC 0.98, p = 0.230) demonstrated similar capability to distinguish cardiac amyloidosis and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. With speckle tracking echocardiography, the predictive performance of the voting model was similar to that of LightGBM (AUC was 0.86 for both), while the AUC of XGBoost was slightly lower (AUC 0.84). In fivefold cross-validation, the voting model was more robust globally and superior to the single model in some test sets. Data-driven machine learning had shown admirable performance in differentiating two conditions and could automatically integrate abundant variables to identify the most discriminating predictors without making preassumptions. In the era of big data, automated machine learning will help to identify patients with cardiac amyloidosis and timely and effectively intervene, thus improving the outcome.