The purpose of this study was to determine classification criteria for sympathetic ophthalmia.

Machine learning of cases with sympathetic ophthalmia and 5 other panuveitides.

Cases of panuveitides were collected in an informatics-designed preliminary database, and a final database was constructed of cases achieving supermajority agreement on the diagnosis using formal consensus techniques. Cases were split into a training set and a validation set. Machine learning using multinomial logistic regression was used in the training set to determine a parsimonious set of criteria that minimized the misclassification rate among the panuveitides. The resulting criteria were evaluated in the validation set.

A total of 1,012 cases of panuveitides, including 110 cases of sympathetic ophthalmia, were evaluated by machine learning. The overall accuracy for panuveitides was 96.3% in the training set and 94.0% in the validation set (95% confidence interval: 89.0-96.8). Key criteria for sympathetic ophthalmia included bilateral uveitis with 1) a history of unilateral ocular trauma or surgery and 2) an anterior chamber and vitreous inflammation or a panuveitis with choroidal involvement. The misclassification rates for sympathetic ophthalmia were 4.2% in the training set and 6.7% in the validation set.

The criteria for sympathetic ophthalmia had a low misclassification rate and appeared to perform sufficiently well for use in clinical and translational research.