Machine learning techniques for diagnosis of rare diseases from medical images
Authors: Toochukwu Juliet Mgbole  , Michael Owusu Asiamah  
Published: October 2024

Introduction/Background: Rare diseases are life-threatening or chronically debilitating conditions that affect a small percentage of the population. Early and accurate diagnosis of rare diseases is challenging due to their complexity and limited understanding. Conventional diagnostic methods are often inadequate, time-consuming, and expensive. Machine learning (ML) has emerged as a promising technique for the analysis of medical images to support the diagnosis of various diseases including rare disorders. ML algorithms can learn complex patterns from large medical imaging datasets to aid clinicians in disease diagnosis, prognosis, and detection of complications. Materials and Methods: A structured search was conducted in electronic databases, including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar to identify peer-reviewed articles published between 2013 to 2023 related to ML-based diagnosis of rare diseases from medical images. A total of 187 articles were identified after removing duplicates. The titles and abstracts of retrieved articles were screened to determine their relevance based on the research objective. Finally, 51 full-text articles were selected for the final review. The key data extracted from selected studies included diseases, imaging modalities, ML algorithms, performance metrics, datasets, and limitations. Results: Most studies evaluated deep learning-based ML techniques, with convolutional neural networks (CNN) being the most applied algorithm. CNNs were mainly used to classify rare diseases based on specific imaging features in X-rays, CT, and MRI scans. Diseases frequently investigated included cardiovascular, neurological, and rare genetic disorders. Publicly available datasets such as Deep Lesion, MSD, and ChestX-ray14 were commonly utilized. Most studies reported high classification accuracy ranging from 80-95% on test datasets. However, limited generalizability due to small private datasets and lack of external validation were limitations. Discussion: The results demonstrate the potential of deep learning for the image-based diagnosis of rare diseases. Features learned from large imaging data sets enabled CNNs to distinguish subtle abnormalities. Hybrid models combining CNNs with other techniques like recurrent neural networks further improved performance. Overall, ML showed promise as a decision support tool. However, more multi-center validation studies are needed using larger and diverse datasets before clinical adoption. Standardization of performance metrics and reporting is also required to establish reliability and generalizability. Conclusion: This comprehensive review provided insights into ongoing research applying ML to medical images for rare disease diagnosis. While initial results are encouraging, further work is still necessary before ML can be reliably used in clinical decision making. Larger collaborative efforts and open-source datasets are needed to advance the field. Standardization of ML frameworks can also promote reproducible research and comparison of different methodologies.