Extraction and evaluation of features of preterm patent ductus arteriosus in chest X-ray images using deep learning

Echocardiography is the gold standard of diagnosis and evaluation of patent ductus arteriosus (PDA), a common condition among preterm infants that can cause hemodynamic abnormalities and increased mortality rates, but this technique requires a skilled specialist and is not always available. Meanwhile, chest X-ray (CXR) imaging is also known to exhibit signs of PDA and is a routine imaging modality in neonatal intensive care units. In this study, we aim to find and objectively define CXR image features that are associated with PDA by training and visually analyzing a deep learning model. We first collected 4617 echocardiograms from neonatal intensive care unit patients and 17,448 CXR images that were taken 4 days before to 3 days after the echocardiograms were obtained. We trained a deep learning model to predict the presence of severe PDA using the CXR images, and then visualized the model using GradCAM++ to identify the regions of the CXR images important for the model’s prediction. The visualization results showed that the model focused on the regions around the upper thorax, lower left heart, and lower right lung. Based on these results, we hypothesized and evaluated three radiographic features of PDA: cardiothoracic ratio, upper heart width to maximum heart width ratio, and upper heart width to thorax width ratio. We then trained an XGBoost model to predict the presence of severe PDA using these radiographic features combined with clinical features. The model achieved an AUC of 0.74, with a high specificity of 0.94. Our study suggests that the proposed radiographic features of CXR images can be used as an auxiliary tool to predict the presence of PDA in preterm infants. This can be useful for the early detection of PDA in neonatal intensive care units in cases where echocardiography is not available.