Opaque ontology: neuroimaging classification of ICD-10 diagnostic groups in the UK Biobank

TL;DR

This study examines how well machine learning can classify mental and neurological disorders using brain scans and other data from the UK Biobank.

Contribution

The study evaluates the effectiveness of ICD-10 diagnostic groups as targets for neuroimaging classification models across multiple disorders.

Findings

Most ICD-10 diagnostic groups were not classified significantly above chance using neuroimaging or sociodemographic features.

Only demyelinating diseases and depression showed significant classification accuracy based on specific feature sets.

Age classification accuracy was consistently high compared to diagnostic group classification.

Abstract

The use of machine learning to classify diagnostic cases versus controls defined based on diagnostic ontologies such as the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) from neuroimaging features is now commonplace across a wide range of diagnostic fields. However, transdiagnostic comparisons of such classifications are lacking. Such transdiagnostic comparisons are important to establish the specificity of classification models, set benchmarks, and assess the value of diagnostic ontologies.

We investigated case-control classification accuracy in 17 different ICD-10 diagnostic groups from Chapter V (mental and behavioral disorders) and Chapter VI (diseases of the nervous system) using data from the UK Biobank. Classification models were trained using either neuroimaging (structural or functional brain magnetic resonance imaging feature sets) or sociodemographic features. Random forest classification models were adopted using rigorous shuffle-splits to estimate stability as well as accuracy of case-control classifications. Diagnostic classification accuracies were benchmarked against age classification (oldest vs. youngest) from the same feature sets and against additional classifier types (k-nearest neighbors and linear support vector machine). In contrast to age classification accuracy, which was high for all feature sets, few ICD-10 diagnostic groups were classified significantly above chance (namely, demyelinating diseases based on structural neuroimaging features and depression based on sociodemographic and functional neuroimaging features).

These findings highlight challenges with the current disease classification system, leading us to recommend caution with the use of ICD-10 diagnostic groups as target labels in brain-based disease prediction studies.

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