Broad Learning Enhanced 1H-MRS for Early Diagnosis of Neuropsychiatric Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Abstract EN

In this paper, we explore the potential of using the multivoxel proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) to diagnose neuropsychiatric systemic lupus erythematosus (NPSLE) with the assistance of a support vector machine broad learning system (BL-SVM).

We retrospectively analysed 23 confirmed patients and 16 healthy controls, who underwent a 3.0 T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequence with multivoxel 1H-MRS in our hospitals.

One hundred and seventeen metabolic features were extracted from the multivoxel 1H-MRS image.

Thirty-three metabolic features selected by the Mann-Whitney U test were considered to have a statistically significant difference (p<0.05).

However, the best accuracy achieved by conventional statistical methods using these 33 metabolic features was only 77%.

We turned to develop a support vector machine broad learning system (BL-SVM) to quantitatively analyse the metabolic features from 1H-MRS.

Although not all the individual features manifested statistics significantly, the BL-SVM could still learn to distinguish the NPSLE from the healthy controls.

The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), the sensitivity, and the specificity of our BL-SVM in predicting NPSLE were 95%, 95.8%, and 93%, respectively, by 3-fold cross-validation.

We consequently conclude that the proposed system effectively and efficiently working on limited and noisy samples may brighten a noinvasive in vivo instrument for early diagnosis of NPSLE.