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. 2021 May 7;27(17):1920–1935. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v27.i17.1920

Table 3.

Artificial intelligence in prediction of therapy response and clinical outcomes in inflammatory bowel disease

Ref.
AI classifier vs comparator
IBD type
Study design and sample size
Modality
Outcomes
Study results/validation cohort
Waljee et al[59], 2018 Random forest (RF). No comparator CD/UC Post-hoc analysis of prospective clinical trial, 594 CD patients Veteran’s Health Administration Electronic Health Record (EHR) Outpatient corticosteroids prescribed for IBD and inpatient hospitalizations associated with a diagnosis of IBD AUC for the RF longitudinal model was 0.85 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.84–0.85]. AUC for the RF longitudinal model using previous hospitalization or steroid use was 0.87 (95%CI: 0.87-0.88). Validation cohort included
Uttam et al[60], 2019 Support vector machines (SVM) vs nanoscale nuclear architecture mapping (NanoNAM) CD/UC Prospective cohort, 103 IBD patients 3-dimensional NanoNAM of normal-appearing rectal biopsies Colonic neoplasia NanoNAM detects colonic neoplasia with an AUC of 0.87 ± 0.04, sensitivity of 0.81 ± 0.09, and specificity of 0.82 ± 0.07 in the independent validation set. Validation cohort included
Waljee et al[61], 2017 RF. No comparator CD/UC Retrospective cohort, 1080 IBD patients EHR, lab values Remission and clinical outcomes with thiopurines AUC for algorithm-predicted remission in the validation set was 0.79 vs 0.49 for 6-TGN. The mean number of clinical events per year in patients with sustained algorithm-predicted remission (APR) was 1.08 vs 3.95 in those that did not have sustained APR (P < 1 × 10-5). Validation cohort included
Popa et al[62], 2020 Neural network model. No comparator UC Prospective cohort, 55 UC patients Clinical and biological parameters and the endoscopic Mayo score Disease activity after one year of anti-TNF treatment The classifier achieved an excellent performance predicting the disease activity at one year with an accuracy of 90% and AUC 0.92 on the test set and an accuracy of 100% and an AUC of 1 on the validation set. Validation cohort included
Douglas et al[45], 2018 RF. No comparator Peds CD Cross-sectional, 20 CD patients, 20 healthy controls Shotgun metagenomics (MGS), 16S rRNA gene sequencing Response to induction therapy 16S genera were again the top dataset (accuracy = 77.8%; P = 0.008) for predicting response to therapy. MGS strain (P = 0.029), genus (P = 0.013), and KEGG pathway (P = 0.018) datasets could also classify patients according to therapy response with accuracy = 72.2% for all three. Validation cohort included
Waljee et al[63], 2010 RF vs boosted trees, RuleFit CD/UC Cross-sectional, 774 IBD patients EHR, lab values (thiopurine metabolites) Response to thiopurine therapy A RF algorithm using laboratory values and patient age differentiated clinical response from nonresponse in the model validation data set with an AUC of 0.856 (95%CI: 0.793-0.919). Validation cohort included
Menti et al[64], 2016 Naïve bayes vs Bayesian additive regression trees vs Bayesian networks CD/UC Retrospective cohort, 152 CD patients Genomic DNA, genetic polymorphism Presence of extra-intestinal manifestations in IBD patients Bayesian networks achieved accuracy of 82% when considering only clinical factors and 89% when considering also genetic information, outperforming the other techniques. Validation cohort included
Waljee et al[65], 2017 RF vs baseline regression model CD/UC Retrospective cohort, 20368 IBD patients EHR, lab values Corticosteroid-free biologic remission with vedolizumab The AUC for corticosteroid-free biologic remission at week 52 using baseline data was only 0.65 (95%CI: 0.53-0.77), but was 0.75 (95%CI: 0.64-0.86) with data through week 6 of vedolizumab. Validation cohort included
Morilla et al[66], 2019 Deep neural networks. No comparator UC Retrospective cohort, 47 UC patients Colonic microrna profiles Responses to therapy A deep neural network-based classifier identified 9 microRNAs plus 5 clinical factors, routinely recorded at time of hospital admission, that were associated with responses of patients to treatment. This panel discriminated responders to steroids from non-responders with 93% accuracy (AUC, 0.91). Three algorithms, based on microRNA levels, identified responders to infliximab vs non-responders (84% accuracy, AUC 0.82) and responders to cyclosporine vs non-responders (80% accuracy, AUC 0.79). Validation cohort included
Wang et al[67], 2020 Back-propagation neural network (BPNN), SVM vs logistic regression CD Cross-sectional, 446 CD patients EHR Medication nonadherence to maintenance therapy The average classification accuracy and AUC of the three models were 85.9% and 0.912 for BPNN, and 87.7% and 0.930 for SVM, respectively. Validation cohort included
Bottigliengo et al[68], 2019 Bayesian machine learning techniques (BMLTs) vs logistic regression CD/UC Retrospective cohort, 142 IBD patients EHR, genetic polymorphisms Presence of extra-intestinal manifestations in IBD patients BMLTs had an AUC of 0.50 for classifying the presence of extra-intestinal manifestations. Validation cohort included
Ghoshal et al[69], 2020 Nonlinear artificial neural network (ANN) vs multivariate linear PCA UC Prospective cohort, 263 UC patients EHR Responses to therapy The multilayer perceptron neural network was trained by back-propagation algorithm (10 networks retained out of 16 tested). The classification accuracy rate was 73% in correctly classifying response to medical treatment in UC patients. No validation cohort included
Sofo et al[70], 2020 SVM leave-one-out cross-validation. No comparator UC Retrospective cohort, 32 UC patients EHR Post-surgical complications after colectomy Evaluating only preoperative features, machine learning algorithms were able to predict minor postoperative complications with a high strike rate (84.3%), high sensitivity (87.5%) and high specificity (83.3%) during the testing phase. Validation cohort included
Kang et al[71], 2017 ANN vs logistic regression UC Cross-sectional, 24 UC patients Gene expression profiles Response to anti-TNF Balanced accuracy in cross validation test for predicting response to anti-TNF therapy in ulcerative colitis patient was 82%. Validation cohort included
Babic et al[72], 1997 CART vs back propagation neural network (BPNN) CD/UC Cross-sectional, 200 IBD patients EHR Quality of life Best reached classification accuracy did not exceed 80% in any case. Other classifiers namely, K-nearest-neighbor, learning vector quantization and BPNN confirmed that outcome. Validation cohort included
Dong et al[73], 2019 RF, SVM, ANN vs logistic regression CD Retrospective cohort, 239 CD patients EHR, laboratory tests Crohn's related surgery The results revealed that RF predictive model performed better than LR model in terms of accuracy (93.11% vs 91.15%), precision (53.42% vs 44.81%), F1 score (0.6016 vs 0.5763), TN rate (95.08% vs 92.00%), and the AUC (0.8926 vs 0.8809). The AUCs were excellent at 0.9864 in RF,0.9538 in LR, 0.8809 in DT, 0.9497 in SVM, and 0.9059 in ANN, respectively. Validation cohort included
Lerrigo et al[74], 2019 Latent Dirichlet allocation, unsupervised machine learning algorithm. No comparator CD/UC Retrospective cohort, 28623 IBD patients Online posts from the Crohn’s and colitis foundation community forum Impact of online community forums on well-being and their emotional content 10702 (20.8%) posts were identified expressing: gratitude (40%), anxiety/fear (20.8%), empathy (18.2%), anger/frustration (13.4%), hope (13.2%), happiness (10.0%), sadness/depression (5.8%), shame/guilt (2.5%), and/or loneliness (2.5%). A common subtheme was the importance of fostering social support. No validation cohort included

AI: Artificial intelligence; IBD: Inflammatory bowel disease; CD: Crohn’s disease; UC: Ulcerative colitis; AUC: Area under the curve; TNF: Tumor necrosis factor.