Systemic sclerosis & Raynaud's
Vision transformer assisting rheumatologists in screening for capillaroscopy changes in systemic sclerosis: an artificial intelligence model
An erratum to this article was published (Rheumatology (Oxford), 1 Sep 2023 ↗)
Authors' conclusion
The ViT is a modern, well-performing and readily available tool for assessing patterns of microangiopathy on NFC images, and it may assist rheumatologists in generating consistent and high-quality NFC reports
Study context
- Population
- Nailfold capilloroscopy (NFC) images of patients with SSc prospectively enrolled in local EUSTAR and Very Early Diagnosis of Systemic Sclerosis (VEDOSS) registries
- Participants
- 17,126 NFC images
- Comparison
- Vision transformer (ViT) vs practising rheumatologists for identifying microangiopathic changes on NFC images
- Outcome
- ViT classification performance for disease-associated changes (enlarged capillaries, giant capillaries, capillary loss, microhaemorrhages) and scleroderma pattern, cross-fold validation
Methodological detailsvision transformer (ViT)-based deep-learning model, cross-fold validation, prospectively enrolled registry patients
- Vision transformer (ViT)-based deep-learning model
- Cross-fold validation
- Prospectively enrolled registry patients
Performance
As reported in the abstract
Identification of microangiopathic changes on NFC
| Test or model | AUC |
|---|---|
| ViT | 81.8% to 84.5% |
ViT
AUC81.8% to 84.5%
Secondary outcomes
ViT vs rheumatologists on reliability set (464 NFC images, majority vote-derived ground truth)
- Rheumatologists reached higher average accuracy and better sensitivity–specificity trade-off than ViT
- Annotators' performance variable; one out of four rheumatologists showed equal or lower classification measures than ViT
Original publication
Vision transformer assisting rheumatologists in screening for capillaroscopy changes in systemic sclerosis: an artificial intelligence model. Rheumatology (Oxford). Published 9 November 2022. doi:10.
Composed by AI from the published abstract and checked against it. How Briefs are made →