All Publications


  • Clinical use of polygenic risk scores for detection of peripheral artery disease and cardiovascular events. PloS one Omiye, J. A., Ghanzouri, I., Lopez, I., Wang, F., Cabot, J., Amal, S., Ye, J., Lopez, N. G., Adebayo-Tijani, F., Ross, E. G. 2024; 19 (5): e0303610

    Abstract

    We have previously shown that polygenic risk scores (PRS) can improve risk stratification of peripheral artery disease (PAD) in a large, retrospective cohort. Here, we evaluate the potential of PRS in improving the detection of PAD and prediction of major adverse cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events (MACCE) and adverse events (AE) in an institutional patient cohort. We created a cohort of 278 patients (52 cases and 226 controls) and fit a PAD-specific PRS based on the weighted sum of risk alleles. We built traditional clinical risk models and machine learning (ML) models using clinical and genetic variables to detect PAD, MACCE, and AE. The models' performances were measured using the area under the curve (AUC), net reclassification index (NRI), integrated discrimination improvement (IDI), and Brier score. We also evaluated the clinical utility of our PAD model using decision curve analysis (DCA). We found a modest, but not statistically significant improvement in the PAD detection model's performance with the inclusion of PRS from 0.902 (95% CI: 0.846-0.957) (clinical variables only) to 0.909 (95% CI: 0.856-0.961) (clinical variables with PRS). The PRS inclusion significantly improved risk re-classification of PAD with an NRI of 0.07 (95% CI: 0.002-0.137), p = 0.04. For our ML model predicting MACCE, the addition of PRS did not significantly improve the AUC, however, NRI analysis demonstrated significant improvement in risk re-classification (p = 2e-05). Decision curve analysis showed higher net benefit of our combined PRS-clinical model across all thresholds of PAD detection. Including PRS to a clinical PAD-risk model was associated with improvement in risk stratification and clinical utility, although we did not see a significant change in AUC. This result underscores the potential clinical utility of incorporating PRS data into clinical risk models for prevalent PAD and the need for use of evaluation metrics that can discern the clinical impact of using new biomarkers in smaller populations.

    View details for DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0303610

    View details for PubMedID 38758931

  • Selective prediction for extracting unstructured clinical data. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA Swaminathan, A., Lopez, I., Wang, W., Srivastava, U., Tran, E., Bhargava-Shah, A., Wu, J. Y., Ren, A. L., Caoili, K., Bui, B., Alkhani, L., Lee, S., Mohit, N., Seo, N., Macedo, N., Cheng, W., Liu, C., Thomas, R., Chen, J. H., Gevaert, O. 2023

    Abstract

    While there are currently approaches to handle unstructured clinical data, such as manual abstraction and structured proxy variables, these methods may be time-consuming, not scalable, and imprecise. This article aims to determine whether selective prediction, which gives a model the option to abstain from generating a prediction, can improve the accuracy and efficiency of unstructured clinical data abstraction.We trained selective classifiers (logistic regression, random forest, support vector machine) to extract 5 variables from clinical notes: depression (n = 1563), glioblastoma (GBM, n = 659), rectal adenocarcinoma (DRA, n = 601), and abdominoperineal resection (APR, n = 601) and low anterior resection (LAR, n = 601) of adenocarcinoma. We varied the cost of false positives (FP), false negatives (FN), and abstained notes and measured total misclassification cost.The depression selective classifiers abstained on anywhere from 0% to 97% of notes, and the change in total misclassification cost ranged from -58% to 9%. Selective classifiers abstained on 5%-43% of notes across the GBM and colorectal cancer models. The GBM selective classifier abstained on 43% of notes, which led to improvements in sensitivity (0.94 to 0.96), specificity (0.79 to 0.96), PPV (0.89 to 0.98), and NPV (0.88 to 0.91) when compared to a non-selective classifier and when compared to structured proxy variables.We showed that selective classifiers outperformed both non-selective classifiers and structured proxy variables for extracting data from unstructured clinical notes.Selective prediction should be considered when abstaining is preferable to making an incorrect prediction.

    View details for DOI 10.1093/jamia/ocad182

    View details for PubMedID 37769323

  • Critically reading machine learning literature in neurosurgery: a reader's guide and checklist for appraising prediction models. Neurosurgical focus Emani, S., Swaminathan, A., Grobman, B., Duvall, J. B., Lopez, I., Arnaout, O., Huang, K. T. 2023; 54 (6): E3

    Abstract

    OBJECTIVE: Machine learning (ML) has become an increasingly popular tool for use in neurosurgical research. The number of publications and interest in the field have recently seen significant expansion in both quantity and complexity. However, this also places a commensurate burden on the general neurosurgical readership to appraise this literature and decide if these algorithms can be effectively translated into practice. To this end, the authors sought to review the burgeoning neurosurgical ML literature and to develop a checklist to help readers critically review and digest this work.METHODS: The authors performed a literature search of recent ML papers in the PubMed database with the terms "neurosurgery" AND "machine learning," with additional modifiers "trauma," "cancer," "pediatric," and "spine" also used to ensure a diverse selection of relevant papers within the field. Papers were reviewed for their ML methodology, including the formulation of the clinical problem, data acquisition, data preprocessing, model development, model validation, model performance, and model deployment.RESULTS: The resulting checklist consists of 14 key questions for critically appraising ML models and development techniques; these are organized according to their timing along the standard ML workflow. In addition, the authors provide an overview of the ML development process, as well as a review of key terms, models, and concepts referenced in the literature.CONCLUSIONS: ML is poised to become an increasingly important part of neurosurgical research and clinical care. The authors hope that dissemination of education on ML techniques will help neurosurgeons to critically review new research better and more effectively integrate this technology into their practices.

    View details for DOI 10.3171/2023.3.FOCUS2352

    View details for PubMedID 37283326

  • Predictive Value of Clinical Complete Response after Chemoradiation for Rectal Cancer Liu, C., Boncompagni, A. A., Perrone, K., Agarwal, A., Hur, D. G., Lopez, I., Sheth, V., Morris, A. M. LIPPINCOTT WILLIAMS & WILKINS. 2022: S51-S52