Machine learning models for screening carotid atherosclerosis in asymptomatic adults

Carotid atherosclerosis (CAS) is a risk factor for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events, but duplex ultrasonography isn’t recommended in routine screening for asymptomatic populations according to medical guidelines. We aim to develop machine learning models to screen CAS in asymptomatic adults. A total of 2732 asymptomatic subjects for routine physical examination in our hospital were included in the study. We developed machine learning models to classify subjects with or without CAS using decision tree, random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), support vector machine (SVM) and multilayer perceptron (MLP) with 17 candidate features. The performance of models was assessed on the testing dataset. The model using MLP achieved the highest accuracy (0.748), positive predictive value (0.743), F1 score (0.742), area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) (0.766) and Kappa score (0.445) among all classifiers. It’s followed by models using XGBoost and SVM. In conclusion, the model using MLP is the best one to screen CAS in asymptomatic adults based on the results from routine physical examination, followed by using XGBoost and SVM. Those models may provide an effective and applicable method for physician and primary care doctors to screen asymptomatic CAS without risk factors in general population, and improve risk predictions and preventions of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events in asymptomatic adults.