Towards an Interpretable Classifier for Characterization of Endoscopic Mayo Scores in Ulcerative Colitis Using Raman Spectroscopy.

Ulcerative colitis (UC) is one of the main types of chronic inflammatory diseases that affect the bowel, but its pathogenesis is yet to be completely defined. Assessing the disease activity of UC is vital for developing a personalized treatment. Conventionally, the assessment of UC is performed by colonoscopy and histopathology. However, conventional methods fail to retain biomolecular information associated to the severity of UC and are solely based on morphological characteristics of the inflamed colon. Furthermore, assessing endoscopic disease severity is limited by the requirement for experienced human reviewers. Therefore, this work presents a nondestructive biospectroscopic technique, for example, Raman spectroscopy, for assessing endoscopic disease severity according to the four-level Mayo subscore. This contribution utilizes multidimensional Raman spectroscopic data to generate a predictive model for identifying colonic inflammation. The predictive modeling of the Raman spectroscopic data is performed using a one-dimensional deep convolutional neural network (1D-CNN). The classification results of 1D-CNN achieved a mean sensitivity of 78% and a mean specificity of 93% for the four Mayo endoscopic scores. Furthermore, the results of the 1D-CNN are interpreted by a first-order Taylor expansion, which extracts the Raman bands important for classification. Additionally, a regression model of the 1D-CNN model is constructed to study the extent of misclassification and border-line patients. The overall results of Raman spectroscopy with 1D-CNN as a classification and regression model show a good performance, and such a method can serve as a complementary method for UC analysis.