Confirmation of the abnormal lipid metabolism as a risk factor for the disease of leukoaraiosis

Our purpose is to screen out medical history indicators and test indicators linked to lipid metabolism which is closely correlated to leukoaraiosis (LA), and to build assistant diagnosis model based on support vector machine (SVM), which provided theoretical evidence for genesis and development of LA. One thousand LA patients who underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examination in Imaging Department was retrospectively analyzed and divided into LA group and non-LA group in accordance with examination results. Detailed clinical statistics of the two groups were collected, including test indicators related to lipid metabolism, such as total cholesterol (TC), triglyceride (TG), low density lipoprotein (LDL), high density lipoprotein (HDL), medical history indicators, age, sex, diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, history of intracranial infection, history of cerebral hemorrhage, cerebral infarction, lacunar infarction and relevant biochemical indexes. The study shows that patients’ incidence of LA was 31.10%; in accordance with Logistic analysis, the incidence of LA is significantly correlated to factors like age, hypertension, history of cerebral hemorrhage, cerebral infarction, lacunar infarction and triglyceride elevation; two SVMs, one including all variables and the other containing all screened variables were successfully established, and the former’s accuracy, specificity and sensitivity respectively were 85.0%, 85.0% and 85.0% while the latter’s 90.0%, 100.0% and 80.0%. Test indicators and medical history indicators of lipid metabolism correlated to LA were screened out successfully. Meanwhile, an effective SVM model also was built successfully, which is able to predict LA relatively accurately and can be used as assistant diagnostic tool for clinicians.