Unsupervised Time-Series Clustering of Left Atrial Strain for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment

Background: Early identification of individuals at high risk for developing cardiovascular (CV) events is of paramount importance for efficient risk management. Here, the authors investigated whether using unsupervised machine learning methods on time-series data of left atrial (LA) strain could distinguish clinically meaningful phenogroups associated with the risk for developing adverse events.

Methods: In 929 community-dwelling individuals (mean age, 51.6 years; 52.9% women), clinical and echocardiographic data were acquired, including LA strain traces, at baseline, and cardiac events were collected on average 6.3 years later. Two unsupervised learning techniques were used: (1) an ensemble of a deep convolutional neural network autoencoder with k-medoids and (2) a self-organizing map to cluster spatiotemporal patterns within LA strain curves. Clinical characteristics and cardiac outcome were used to evaluate the validity of the k clusters using the original cohort, while an external population cohort (n = 378) was used to validate the trained models.

Results: In both approaches, the optimal number of clusters was five. The first three clusters had differences in sex distribution and heart rate but had a similar low CV risk profile. On the other hand, cluster 5 had the worst CV profile and a higher prevalence of left ventricular remodeling and diastolic dysfunction compared with the other clusters. The respective indexes of cluster 4 were between those of clusters 1 to 3 and 5. After adjustment for traditional risk factors, cluster 5 had the highest risk for cardiac events compared with clusters 1, 2, and 3 (hazard ratio, 1.36; 95% CI, 1.09-1.70; P = .0063). Similar LA strain patterns were obtained when the models were applied to the external validation cohort, and clinical characteristics revealed similar CV risk profiles across all clusters.

Conclusion: Unsupervised machine learning algorithms used in time-series LA strain curves identified clinically meaningful clusters of LA deformation and provide incremental prognostic information over traditional risk factors.