Clinical decision support in pediatric anorexia nervosa: cliexa and Kartini Clinic

Kartini Clinic and cliexa tested decision-support software on records from 606 children and teens with anorexia nervosa. On cases it had not seen before, the software’s decisions matched expert clinicians’ decisions 90.5% of the time. The paper is in press at PLOS Digital Health.

  • Pediatric eating disorders
  • Research collaboration
  • Clinical decision support
AgreementHeld-out cases
Agreement with experts
90.5%
0%100%

How often the software’s decision matched an expert clinician’s, on cases it had not seen.

AccuracyAUC-ROC
Accuracy score
0.87
0.5 chance1.0 perfect

On a scale where 0.5 is chance and 1.0 is perfect (AUC-ROC).

Diagnoses79 of 86
Correct diagnoses
91.9%

The diagnosis was classified correctly in 79 of 86 cases.

PatientsAges 7 to 17
Patients studied
606
Age 0Ages 7 to 1718

Children and teens ages 7 to 17 with anorexia nervosa.

Source: O’Toole J, Bermudez O, Kazgan M, et al. Clinical decision support in pediatric anorexia nervosa. PLOS Digital Health, in press.

The short version

Kartini Clinic and cliexa tested decision-support software on records from 606 children and teens with anorexia nervosa. On cases it had not seen before, the software’s decisions matched expert clinicians’ decisions 90.5% of the time. The records also showed that age and early weight gain are strong signs of how treatment will go.

01

About Kartini Clinic.

Kartini Clinic is a specialty pediatric eating disorder treatment center in Portland, Oregon, founded in 1998 by Dr. Julie O’Toole.

The clinic treats children and adolescents ages 6 to 18, with a medical-first, family-centered, evidence-driven approach to care.

02

What did the study do?

Researchers at Kartini Clinic used cliexa to study treatment records from 606 children and teens, ages 7 to 17, with anorexia nervosa. The records came from four clinical datasets collected over 20 years, from 2000 to 2020.

In plain terms: the team looked for patterns in past patient records, used those patterns to build decision-support software, and then tested the software against the decisions of expert clinicians.

  1. 01

    Find the patterns

    First, standard statistics looked for patterns in the records. They found three:

    • Age 14 is an important dividing line for treatment.
    • Younger patients respond better to family-centered treatment, even though they are sicker when they arrive.
    • How quickly a patient gains weight in weeks 2 to 3 helps predict how treatment will go overall.
  2. 02

    Turn the patterns into decision support

    Then cliexa’s clinical rules engine turned those patterns into inputs for a machine learning model (a type called gradient boosting, or XGBoost). It also pulled out a set of simple, readable rules (using a method called RIPPER) that a clinician can read and check.

03

How well did the software work?

The software was tested on cases it had not seen during training, and its decisions were compared with those of expert clinicians.

How closely it matched expert doctors

90.5%Agreement with experts

On the cases held back for testing, the software’s decision matched the expert clinician’s decision 90.5% of the time.

0.87Overall accuracy score

This score (called AUC-ROC) shows how well a model tells outcomes apart. 0.5 is no better than chance and 1.0 is perfect. The likely range here is 0.81 to 0.92.

91.9%Correct diagnoses

The software classified the diagnosis correctly in 79 of 86 cases.

A closer look at its accuracy

What was measuredResult
When it flagged a case, how often it was right (precision)84%
How many of the real cases it caught (recall)82%
How well its confidence matched reality (Brier score; closer to 0 is better)0.16
Correctly spotting the binge-purge type, AN-BP86.7%
Correctly ruling out the restricting type, AN-R, when it was not present94.6%
04

What did the records show about patients?

The records also revealed clear patterns in who responds to treatment, and how quickly.

Age 14 was a dividing line

85.9%Under 14

of this group had the restricting type of anorexia nervosa (AN-R).

54.1%14 and older

of this group had the restricting type (AN-R). The gap is statistically significant, meaning it is very unlikely to be due to chance (χ² = 60.9, p < 0.001).

Younger patients did better

95.8%Under 14

reached 100% of their expected weight within 120 days.

69.4%14 and older

reached 100% of their expected weight within 120 days.

  • The first weeks are a strong signal. Weight gain in weeks 2 to 3 was the strongest early sign of how treatment would go. The model weighed it more than any other factor (SHAP value 0.34, a measure of how much a factor influences a prediction).
  • Severity cutoffs depend on age. The study used cutoffs on the REDS-C severity scale: 36 or higher for patients under 14, and 40 or higher for patients 14 and older. These cutoffs held up when the analysis was re-run under different assumptions (sensitivity analyses).
05

What it shows about cliexa.

cliexa combines patient context and clinical protocols to guide action within existing workflows. Clinicians retain judgment.

  • From Records to Reason®, in practice. Four separate sets of patient records were combined and turned into clear clinical decision rules that matched expert decisions 90.5% of the time.
  • Explainable, not a black box. Every recommendation traces back to patterns found in the data, so clinicians can see why the software suggests what it does.
  • Tested on patients it had not seen. The results come from patients the software was not trained on. The team used a method called cross-validation (stratified 5-fold), which repeatedly sets patients aside for testing.
  • Many kinds of information. The model drew on five kinds of information: risk indicators, diagnosis type, physical (physiological) markers, response to treatment, and other mental health conditions that occur alongside anorexia (psychiatric comorbidity).
06

The study team.

Julie O’Toole, MD, MPHCMO, Kartini Clinic; creator of the REDS-C assessment
Janiece DeSocio, PhD, PMHNPKartini Clinic
Mehmet Kazgan, MD, MS, MBAFounder and CEO, cliexa
Ovidio Bermudez, MDSenior Medical Advisor, Eating Recovery Center
Morgan O’Toole, MACEO, Kartini Clinic
Citation

O’Toole J, Bermudez O, Kazgan M, et al. Clinical decision support in pediatric anorexia nervosa. PLOS Digital Health, in press.

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