Predicting success or failure of brace treatment for adolescents with idiopathic scoliosis

Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) is a three-dimensional spinal deformity. Bracetreatment is a common non-surgical treatment, intended to prevent progression (worsening) of the condition during adolescence. Estimating a bracedpatient’s risk of progression is an essential part of planning treatment, so method for predicting this risk would be a useful decision support tool for practitioners. This work attempts to discover whether failure of bracetreatment (progression) can be predicted at the start of treatment. Records were obtained for 62 AIS patients who had completed bracetreatment. Subjects were labeled as “progressive” if their condition had progressed despite bracetreatment and “non-progressive” otherwise. Wrapper-based feature selection selected two useful predictor variables from a list of 14 clinical measurements taken from the records. A logistic regressionmodel was trained to classify patients as “progressive” or “non-progressive” using these two variables. The logistic regressionmodel’s simplicity and interpretability should facilitate its clinical acceptance. The model was tested on data from an additional 28 patients and found to be 75 % accurate. This accuracy is sufficient to make the predictions clinically useful. It can be used online: http://www.ece.ualberta.ca/~dchalmer/SimpleBracePredictor.html.