Sjögren’s is an autoimmune disease that almost always affects the salivary glands and/or tear ducts, resulting in symptoms like dry mouth and dry eyes. In other individuals, however, Sjögren’s also affects vital organs like the lungs, kidneys, or blood vessels.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze biopsies of the salivary glands in people with Sjögren’s disease may help identify patients who are likely to have disease involvement in vital organs. According to the researchers, the novel model developed by the team achieves high accuracy in predicting vital organ involvement. The results demonstrate that the model can automatically identify key features within salivary gland biopsies and correlate them with the risk of organ involvement.
The researchers took biopsies from Sjögren’s disease patients with or without vital organ involvement and fed them into an AI program, which used mathematical rules to identify patterns associated with a greater likelihood of this complication. The AI was trained and validated on a set of biopsies from 124 patients. Then, biopsies from a separate set of 97 patients were used to test the model. The AUC of the AI model on the test dataset was 0.732, reflecting reasonably good accuracy.