Effective automated prediction of vertebral column pathologies based on logistic model tree with SMOTE preprocessing.

Abstract

This study develops a logistic model tree based automation system based on for accurate recognition of types of vertebral column pathologies. Six biomechanical measures are used for this purpose: pelvic incidence, pelvic tilt, lumbar lordosis angle, sacral slope, pelvic radius and grade of spondylolisthesis. A two-phase classification model is employed in which the first step is preprocessing the data by use of Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE), and the second one is feeding the classifier Logistic Model Tree (LMT) with the preprocessed data. We have achieved an accuracy of 89.73 %, and 0.964 Area Under Curve (AUC) in computer based automatic detection of the pathology. This was validated via a 10-fold-cross-validation experiment conducted on clinical records of 310 patients. The study also presents a comparative analysis of the vertebral column data with the use of several machine learning algorithms.