Abstract
BACKGROUND: Endoscopic evaluation remains the gold standard for assessing Crohn's disease (CD) activity and mucosal healing (MH), but it is invasive, expensive and time consuming. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a non-invasive quantitative alternative method. AIM: To develop a topological radiomics-based multi-task deep learning model for simultaneous prediction of MH status and endoscopic activity scores in CD. METHODS: A total of 81 CD patients were stratified into training (n=60) and validation (n=21) groups at a 7:3 ratio. Topological radiomic features were extracted from multiphase CT enterography. A multi-task model was trained to predict MH (classification) and SES-CD (regression), integrating feature selection and SHAP-based interpretability. RESULTS: Three discriminative topological features were identified across arterial and portal phases. For MH prediction, the multi-task model achieved an AUC of 0.938 for training set and 0.875 for validation set. For SES-CD prediction, it showed lower MSE and MAE, with higher R(2) and C-index than the single-phase models. CONCLUSION: The multi-task topological radiomics framework enables accurate, non-invasive assessment of mucosal healing and endoscopic activity in CD, offering a clinically interpretable approach with strong translational potential. Future studies with larger cohorts are warranted to further validate its robustness.