Neural network application for assessing thyroid-associated orbitopathy activity using orbital computed tomography

This study aimed to propose a neural network (NN)-based method to evaluate thyroid-associated orbitopathy (TAO) patient activity using orbital computed tomography (CT). Orbital CT scans were obtained from 144 active and 288 inactive TAO patients. These CT scans were preprocessed by selecting eleven slices from axial, coronal, and sagittal planes and segmenting the region of interest. We devised an NN employing information extracted from 13 pipelines to assess these slices and clinical patient age and sex data for TAO activity evaluation. The proposed NN's performance in evaluating active and inactive TAO patients achieved a 0.871 area under the receiver operating curve (AUROC), 0.786 sensitivity, and 0.779 specificity values. In contrast, the comparison models CSPDenseNet and ConvNeXt were significantly inferior to the proposed model, with 0.819 (p = 0.029) and 0.774 (p = 0.04) AUROC values, respectively. Ablation studies based on the Sequential Forward Selection algorithm identified vital information for optimal performance and evidenced that NNs performed best with three to five active pipelines. This study establishes a promising TAO activity diagnosing tool with further validation.