Precise discrimination of mycobacterial pulmonary diseases via multimodal machine learning integrating chest CT and clinical markers.

Differentiating Mycobacterium tuberculosis lung disease (mycobacterium tuberculosis lung disease) from nontuberculous mycobacterial lung disease (nontuberculous mycobacterial lung disease) remains clinically challenging because of overlapping symptoms and imaging features, as well as the slow turnaround of conventional culture-based diagnostics.