Automatic Detection of Genetic Diseases in Pediatric Age Using Pupillometry

Inherited retinal diseases cause severe visual deficits in children. They are classified in outer and inner retina diseases, and often cause blindness in childhood. The diagnosis for this type of illness is challenging, given the wide range of clinical and genetic causes (with over 200 causative genes). It is routinely based on a complex pattern of clinical tests, including invasive ones, not always appropriate for infants or young children. A different approach is thus needed, that exploits Chromatic Pupillometry, a technique increasingly used to assess outer and inner retina functions. This paper presents a novel Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS), based on Machine Learning using Chromatic Pupillometry in order to support diagnosis of Inherited retinal diseases in pediatric subjects. An approach that combines hardware and software is proposed: a dedicated medical equipment (pupillometer) is used with a purposely designed custom machine learning decision support system. Two distinct Support Vector Machines (SVMs), one for each eye, classify the features extracted from the pupillometric data. The designed CDSS has been used for diagnosis of Retinitis Pigmentosa in pediatric subjects. The results, obtained by combining the two SVMs in an ensemble model, show satisfactory performance of the system, that achieved 0.846 accuracy, 0.937 sensitivity and 0.786 specificity. This is the first study that applies machine learning to pupillometric data in order to diagnose a genetic disease in pediatric age.