A maChine and deep Learning Approach to predict pulmoNary hyperteNsIon in newbornS with congenital diaphragmatic Hernia (CLANNISH): Protocol for a retrospective study

Abstract

Introduction Outcome predictions of patients with congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) still have some limitations in the prenatal estimate of postnatal pulmonary hypertension (PH). We propose applying Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL) approaches to fetuses and newborns with CDH to develop forecasting models in prenatal epoch, based on the integrated analysis of clinical data, to provide neonatal PH as the first outcome and, possibly: favorable response to fetal endoscopic tracheal occlusion (FETO), need for Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO), survival to ECMO, and death. Moreover, we plan to produce a (semi)automatic fetus lung segmentation system in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which will be useful during project implementation but will also be an important tool itself to standardize lung volume measures for CDH fetuses. Methods and analytics Patients with isolated CDH from singleton pregnancies will be enrolled, whose prenatal checks were performed at the Fetal Surgery Unit of the Fondazione IRCCS Ca’ Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico (Milan, Italy) from the 30th week of gestation. A retrospective data collection of clinical and radiological variables from newborns’ and mothers’ clinical records will be performed for eligible patients born between 01/01/2012 and 31/12/2020. The native sequences from fetal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) will be collected. Data from different sources will be integrated and analyzed using ML and DL, and forecasting algorithms will be developed for each outcome. Methods of data augmentation and dimensionality reduction (feature selection and extraction) will be employed to increase sample size and avoid overfitting. A software system for automatic fetal lung volume segmentation in MRI based on the DL 3D U-NET approach will also be developed. Ethics and dissemination This retrospective study received approval from the local ethics committee (Milan Area 2, Italy). The development of predictive models in CDH outcomes will provide a key contribution in disease prediction, early targeted interventions, and personalized management, with an overall improvement in care quality, resource allocation, healthcare, and family savings. Our findings will be validated in a future prospective multicenter cohort study. Registration The study was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov with the identifier NCT04609163.

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Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia: automatic lung and liver MRI segmentation with nnU-Net, reproducibility of pyradiomics features, and a Machine Learning application for the classification of liver herniation.

“…This study represents an exploratory secondary analysis of the CLANNISH retrospective cohort study [20]…”

Assessment of the fetal lungs in utero

“…Using this approach, the aim is to ultimately build an AI system able to identify patients in the antenatal period at high risk of developing CDH-associated pulmonary hypoplasia. 27 Multimodal fusion imaging, which allows superimposition of real-time ultrasound images and multiplanar reconstruction images of MRI, is another promising technique, which has been assessed to date in multiple conditions including CDH and pulmonary sequestration. 28 Abnormal lung development and associated lung pathologies Normal fetal lung development can be disrupted at any stage of development (Table 1).…”