Abstract/Summary

Early detection of inflammatory arthritis (IA) is critical to efficient and accurate hospital referral triage for timely treatment and preventing the deterioration of the IA disease course, especially under limited healthcare resources. The manual assessment process is the most common approach in practice for the early detection of IA, but it is extremely labor-intensive and inefficient. A large amount of clinical information needs to be assessed for every referral from General Practice (GP) to the hospitals. Machine learning shows great potential in automating repetitive assessment tasks and providing decision support for the early detection of IA. However, most machine learning-based methods for IA detection rely on blood testing results. But in practice, blood testing data is not always available at the point of referrals, so we need methods to leverage multimodal data such as semi-structured and unstructured data for early detection of IA. In this research, we present an ensemble learning-based method using multimodal data to assist decision-making in the early detection of IA. Experimental results show the precision, recall, F1-Score, accuracy, and G-Mean of 0.89, 0.85, 0.86, 0.85, and 0.88. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first attempt to utilize multimodal data to support the early detection of IA from GP referrals.