Carlo Dindorf, Jürgen Konradi, Claudia Wolf, Bertram Taetz, Gabriele Bleser, Janine Huthwelker, Friederike Werthmann, Eva Bartaguiz, Johanna Kniepert, Philipp Drees, Ulrich Betz, Michael Fröhlich
- Clinical classification models are mostly pathology-dependent and, thus, are only able to
detect pathologies they have been trained for. Research is needed regarding pathology-independent
classifiers and their interpretation. Hence, our aim is to develop a pathology-independent classifier
that provides prediction probabilities and explanations of the classification decisions. Spinal posture
data of healthy subjects and various pathologies (back pain, spinal fusion, osteoarthritis), as
well as synthetic data, were used for modeling. A one-class support vector machine was used as a
pathology-independent classifier. The outputs were transformed into a probability distribution according
to Platt’s method. Interpretation was performed using the explainable artificial intelligence
tool Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations. The results were compared with those obtained
by commonly used binary classification approaches. The best classification results were obtained
for subjects with a spinal fusion. Subjects with back pain were especially challenging to distinguish
from the healthy reference group. The proposed method proved useful for the interpretation
of the predictions. No clear inferiority of the proposed approach compared to commonly used
binary classifiers was demonstrated. The application of dynamic spinal data seems important for
future works. The proposed approach could be useful to provide an objective orientation and to
individually adapt and monitor therapy measures pre- and post-operatively.