Detection of pediatric developmental delay with machine learning technologies

Objective: Accurate identification of children who will develop delay (DD) is challenging for therapists because recent studies have reported that children who underwent early intervention achieved more favorable outcomes than those who did not. In this study, we have investigated how the frequencies of three types of therapy, namely the physical therapy, the occupational therapy, and the speech therapy, received by a child can be exploited to predict whether the child suffers from DD or not. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is of high interest as these features can be obtained with essentially no cost and therefore a prediction model built accordingly can be employed to screen the subjects who may develop DD before advanced and costly diagnoses are carried out. Methods: This study has been conducted based on a data set comprising the records of 2,552 outpatients (N = 34,862 visits, mean age = 72.34 months) collected at a hospital in Taiwan from 2012 to 2016. We then built 3 types of machine learning based prediction models, namely the deep neural network models (DNN), the support vector machine (SVM) models, and the decision tree (DT) models, to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Results: Experimental results reveal that in terms of the F1 score, which is the harmonic mean of the sensitivity and the positive predictive value, the DT models outperformed the DNN models and the SVM models, if a high level of sensitivity is desired. In particular, the DT model developed in this study delivered the sensitivity at 0.902 and the positive predictive value at 0.723. Conclusions: What has been learned from this study is that the frequencies of the therapies that a child has received provide valuable information for predicting whether the child suffers from DD. Due to the performance observed in the experiments and the fact that these features can be obtained essentially without any cost, it is conceivable that the prediction models built accordingly can be wide exploited in clinical practices and significantly improve the treatment outcomes of the children who develop DD.