Application of Machine Learning Algorithms for Prognostic Assessment in Rotator Cuff Pathologies: A Clinical Data-Based Approach

Abstract

Aim: The overall aim of this proposal is to ameliorate the care of rotator cuff (RC) tear patients by applying an innovative machine learning approach for outcome prediction after arthroscopic repair. Materials and Methods: We applied state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to evaluate the best predictors of the outcome, and 100 RC patients were evaluated at baseline (T0), after 1 month (T1), 3 months (T2), 6 months (T3), and 1 year (T4) from surgical intervention. The outcome measure was the Costant–Murley Shoulder Score, whereas age, sex, BMI, the 36-Item Short-Form Survey, the Simple Shoulder Test, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons Score, the Oxford Shoulder Score, and the Shoulder Pain and Disability Index were considered as predictive factors. Support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), naïve Bayes (NB), and random forest (RF) algorithms were employed. Results: Across all sessions, the classifiers demonstrated suboptimal performance when using both the complete and shrunken sets of features. Specifically, the logistic regression (LR) classifier achieved a mean accuracy of 46.5% ± 6%, while the random forest (RF) classifier achieved 51.25% ± 4%. For the shrunken set of features, LR obtained a mean accuracy of 48.5% ± 6%, and RF achieved 45.5% ± 4.5%. No statistical differences were found when comparing the performance metrics of ML algorithms. Conclusions: This study underlines the importance of extending the application of AI methods to new predictors, such as neuroimaging and kinematic data, in order to better record significant shifts in RC patients’ prognosis. Limitations: The data quality within the cohort could represent a limitation, since certain variables, such as smoking, diabetes, and work injury, are known to have an impact on the outcome.