Osteoarthritis of the Temporomandibular Joint can be diagnosed earlier using biomarkers and machine learning

After chronic low back pain, Temporomandibular Joint (TMJ) disorders are the second most common musculoskeletal condition affecting 5 to 12% of the population, with an annual health cost estimated at $4 billion. Chronic disability in TMJ osteoarthritis (OA) increases with aging, and the main goal is to diagnosis before morphological degeneration occurs. Here, we address this challenge using advanced data science to capture, process and analyze 52 clinical, biological and high-resolution CBCT (radiomics) markers from TMJ OA patients and controls. We tested the diagnostic performance of four machine learning models: Logistic Regression, Random Forest, LightGBM, XGBoost. Headaches, Range of mouth opening without pain, Energy, Haralick Correlation, Entropy and interactions of TGF-β1 in Saliva and Headaches, VE-cadherin in Serum and Angiogenin in Saliva, VE-cadherin in Saliva and Headaches, PA1 in Saliva and Headaches, PA1 in Saliva and Range of mouth opening without pain; Gender and Muscle Soreness; Short Run Low Grey Level Emphasis and Headaches, Inverse Difference Moment and Trabecular Separation accurately diagnose early stages of this clinical condition. Our results show the XGBoost + LightGBM model with these features and interactions achieves the accuracy of 0.823, AUC 0.870, and F1-score 0.823 to diagnose the TMJ OA status. Thus, we expect to boost future studies into osteoarthritis patient-specific therapeutic interventions, and thereby improve the health of articular joints.