Prediction of Aortic Contrast Enhancement on Dynamic Hepatic Computed Tomography-Performance Comparison of Machine Learning Methods and Simulation Software.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to compare prediction ability between ensemble machine learning (ML) methods and simulation software for aortic contrast enhancement on dynamic hepatic computed tomography.

Methods: We divided 339 human hepatic dynamic computed tomography scans into 2 groups. One group consisted of 279 scans used to create cross-validation data sets, the other group of 60 scans were used as test data sets. To evaluate the effect of the patient characteristics on enhancement, we calculated changes in the contrast medium dose per enhancement of the abdominal aorta in the hepatic arterial phase. The parameters for ML were the patient sex, age, height, body weight, body mass index, and cardiac output. We trained 9 ML regressors by applying 5-fold cross-validation, integrated the predictions of all ML regressors for ensemble learning and the simulations, and used the training and test data to compare their Pearson correlation coefficients.

Results: Comparison of different ML methods showed that the Pearson correlation coefficient for the real and predicted contrast medium dose per enhancement of the abdominal aorta was highest with ensemble ML (r = 0.786). It was higher than that obtained with the simulation software (r = 0.350). With ensemble ML, the Bland-Altman limit of agreement [mean difference, 5.26 Hounsfield units (HU); 95% limit of agreement, -112.88 to 123.40 HU] was narrower than that obtained with the simulation software (mean difference, 11.70 HU; 95% limit of agreement, -164.71 to 188.11 HU).

Conclusion: The performance for predicting contrast enhancement of the abdominal aorta in the hepatic arterial phase was higher with ensemble ML than with the simulation software.