AuthorsF. Fineide, A. Storås, M. Riegler and T. Utheim
TitlePredicting Meibomian Gland Dropout and Feature Importance Analysis with Explainable Artificial Intelligence
AfilliationMachine Learning
Project(s)Department of Holistic Systems
StatusAccepted
Publication TypeProceedings, refereed
Year of Publication2023
Conference NameIEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (IEEE CBMS2023)
KeywordsDry eye disease, Explainable artificial intelligence, Machine learning, meibography, meibomian gland dysfunction
Abstract

Dry eye disease is a common and potentially debilitating medical condition. Meibum secreted from the meibomian glands is the largest contributor to the outermost, protective lipid layer of the tear film. Dysfunction of the meibomian glands is the most common cause of dry eye disease. As meibomian gland dysfunction progresses, gradual atrophy of the glands is observed. The meibomian glands are commonly visualized through meibography, a technique requiring specialist equipment and knowledge that might not be available to the physician. In the present project we use machine learning on clinical tabular data to predict the degree of meibomian gland dropout. Moreover, we employ explainable artificial intelligence on the best performing algorithms for feature importance evaluation. The best performing algorithms were AdaBoost, multilayer perceptron and LightGBM which outperformed the majority vote baseline classifier in every included evaluation metric for both multioutput and binary classification. Through explainable artificial intelligence known associations are validated and novel connections identified and discussed.

Citation Key43319