Synergistic combination of clinical and imaging features predicts abnormal imaging patterns of pulmonary infections

We designed and tested a novel hybrid statistical model that accepts radiologic image features and clinical variables, and integrates this information in order to automatically predict abnormalities in chest computed-tomography (CT) scans and identify potentially important infectious disease biomarkers. In 200 patients, 160 with various pulmonary infections and 40 healthy controls, we extracted 34 clinical variables from laboratory tests and 25 textural features from CT images. From the CT scans, pleural effusion (PE), linear opacity (or thickening) (LT), tree-in-bud (TIB), pulmonary nodules, ground glass opacity (GGO), and consolidation abnormality patterns were analyzed and predicted through clinical, textural (imaging), or combined attributes. The presence and severity of each abnormality pattern was validated by visual analysis of the CT scans. The proposed biomarker identification system included two important steps: (i) a coarse identification of an abnormal imaging pattern by adaptively selected features (AmRMR), and (ii) a fine selection of the most important features from the previous step, and assigning them as biomarkers, depending on the prediction accuracy. Selected biomarkers were used to classify normal and abnormal patterns by using a boosted decision tree (BDT) classifier. For all abnormal imaging patterns, an average prediction accuracy of 76.15% was obtained. Experimental results demonstrated that our proposed biomarker identification approach is promising and may advance the data processing in clinical pulmonary infection research and diagnostic techniques.