Generative method to discover emphysema subtypes with unsupervised learning using lung macroscopic patterns (LMPS): The MESA COPD study

Pulmonary emphysema overlaps considerably with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and is traditionally subcategorized into three subtypes: centrilobular emphysema (CLE), panlobular emphysema (PLE) and paraseptal emphysema (PSE). Automated classification methods based on supervised learning are generally based upon the current definition of emphysema subtypes, while unsupervised learning of texture patterns enables the objective discovery of possible new radiological emphysema subtypes. In this work, we use a variant of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to discover lung macroscopic patterns (LMPs) in an unsupervised way from lung regions that encode emphysematous areas. We evaluate the possible utility of the LMPs as potential novel emphysema subtypes via measuring their level of reproducibility when varying the learning set and by their ability to predict traditional radiological emphysema subtypes. Experimental results show that our algorithm can discover highly reproducible LMPs, that predict traditional emphysema subtypes.