Classification models for assessing coronary artery disease instances using clinical and biometric data: an explainable man-in-the-loop approach

The main goal driving this work is to develop computer-aided classification models relying on clinical data to identify coronary artery disease (CAD) instances with high accuracy while incorporating the expert’s opinion as input, making it a “man-in-the-loop” approach. CAD is traditionally diagnosed in a definite manner by Invasive Coronary Angiography (ICA). A dataset was created using biometric and clinical data from 571 patients (21 total features, 43% ICA-confirmed CAD instances) along with the expert’s diagnostic yield. Five machine learning classification algorithms were applied to the dataset. For the selection of the best feature set for each algorithm, three different parameter selection algorithms were used. Each ML model’s performance was evaluated using common metrics, and the best resulting feature set for each is presented. A stratified ten-fold validation was used for the performance evaluation. This procedure was run both using the assessments of experts/doctors as input and without them. The significance of this paper lies in its innovative approach of incorporating the expert’s opinion as input in the classification process, making it a “man-in-the-loop” approach. This approach not only increases the accuracy of the models but also provides an added layer of explainability and transparency, allowing for greater trust and confidence in the results. Maximum achievable accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are 83.02%, 90.32%, and 85.49% when using the expert’s diagnosis as input, compared to 78.29%, 76.61%, and 86.07% without the expert’s diagnosis. The results of this study demonstrate the potential for this approach to improve the diagnosis of CAD and highlight the importance of considering the role of human expertise in the development of computer-aided classification models.