Predicting Space Radiation Single Ion Exposure in Rodents: A Machine Learning Approach

Abstract

This study presents a data-driven machine learning approach to predict individual Galactic Cosmic Radiation (GCR) ion exposure for 4He, 16O, 28Si, 48Ti, or 56Fe up to 150 mGy, based on Attentional Set-shifting (ATSET) experimental tests. The ATSET assay consists of a series of cognitive performance tasks on irradiated male Wistar rats. The GCR ion doses represent the expected cumulative radiation astronauts may receive during a Mars mission on an individual ion basis. The primary objective is to synthesize and assess predictive models on a per-subject level through Machine Learning (ML) classifiers. The raw cognitive performance data from individual rodent subjects are used as features to train the models and to explore the capabilities of three different ML techniques for elucidating a range of correlations between received radiation on rodents and their performance outcomes. The analysis employs scores of selected input features and different normalization approaches which yield varying degrees of model performance. The current study shows that support vector machine, Gaussian naive Bayes, and random forest models are capable of predicting individual ion exposure using ATSET scores where corresponding Matthews correlation coefficients and F1 scores reflect model performance exceeding random chance. The study suggests a decremental effect on cognitive performance in rodents due to ≤150 mGy of single ion exposure, inasmuch as the models can discriminate between 0 mGy and any exposure level in the performance score feature space. A number of observations about the utility and limitations in specific normalization routines and evaluation scores are examined as well as best practices for ML with imbalanced datasets observed.

Quantitative proteomic analytic approaches to identify metabolic changes in the medial prefrontal cortex of rats exposed to space radiation

“…There is a comprehensive body of data on the effect that a wide spectrum of SR species has on performance in the attentional set shifting (ATSET) assay (Parihar et al, 2016;Britten et al, 2018;Britten et al, 2020a;Britten et al, 2021b;Burket et al, 2021). These data sets are now being analyzed with machine learning assisted computational approaches to fully characterize the cognitive deficits induced (Matar et al, 2021;Prelich et al, 2021). However, a readily identifiable consequence of SR exposure is the loss of performance in the Simple Discrimination (SD) stage of the ATSET test.…”