A machine learning-based score for precise echocardiographic assessment of cardiac remodelling in hypertensive young adults

AIMS: Accurate staging of hypertension-related cardiac changes, before the development of significant left ventricular hypertrophy, could help guide early prevention advice. We evaluated whether a novel semi-supervised machine learning approach could generate a clinically meaningful summary score of cardiac remodelling in hypertension. METHODS AND RESULTS: A contrastive trajectories inference approach was applied to data collected from three UK studies of young adults. Low-dimensional variance was identified in 66 echocardiography variables from participants with hypertension (systolic ≥160 mmHg) relative to a normotensive group (systolic < 120 mmHg) using a contrasted principal component analysis. A minimum spanning tree was constructed to derive a normalized score for each individual reflecting extent of cardiac remodelling between zero (health) and one (disease). Model stability and clinical interpretability were evaluated as well as modifiability in response to a 16-week exercise intervention. A total of 411 young adults (29 ± 6 years) were included in the analysis, and, after contrastive dimensionality reduction, 21 variables characterized >80% of data variance. Repeated scores for an individual in cross-validation were stable (root mean squared deviation = 0.1 ± 0.002) with good differentiation of normotensive and hypertensive individuals (area under the receiver operating characteristics 0.98). The derived score followed expected hypertension-related patterns in individual cardiac parameters at baseline and reduced after exercise, proportional to intervention compliance (P = 0.04) and improvement in ventilatory threshold (P = 0.01). CONCLUSION: A quantitative score that summarizes hypertension-related cardiac remodelling in young adults can be generated from a computational model. This score might allow more personalized early prevention advice, but further evaluation of clinical applicability is required.