Medical diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases using an interval-valued fuzzy rule-based classification system

Objective: To develop a classifier that tackles the problem of determining the risk of a patient of suffering from a cardiovascular disease within the next ten years. The system has to provide both a diagnosis and an interpretable model explaining the decision. In this way, doctors are able to analyse the usefulness of the information given by the system. Methods: Linguistic fuzzy rule-based classification systems are used, since they provide a good classification rate and a highly interpretable model. More specifically, a new methodology to combine fuzzy rule-based classification systems with interval-valued fuzzy sets is proposed, which is composed of three steps: 1) the modelling of the linguistic labels of the classifier using interval-valued fuzzy sets; 2) the use of the Kα operator in the inference process and 3) the application of a genetic tuning to find the best ignorance degree that each interval-valued fuzzy set represents as well as the best value for the parameter α of the Kα operator in each rule. Results: The suitability of the new proposal to deal with this medical diagnosis classification problem is shown by comparing its performance with respect to the one provided by two classical fuzzy classifiers and a previous interval-valued fuzzy rule-based classification system. The performance of the new method is statistically better than the ones obtained with the methods considered in the comparison. The new proposal enhances both the total number of correctly diagnosed patients, around 3% with respect the classical fuzzy classifiers and around 1% versus the previous interval-valued fuzzy classifier, and the classifier ability to correctly differentiate patients of the different risk categories. Conclusion: The proposed methodology is a suitable tool to face the medical diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases, since it obtains a good classification rate and it also provides an interpretable model that can be easily understood by the doctors.This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology under project TIN2010-15055 and the Research Services of the Universidad Pública de Navarra

An Ontology-Based Interpretable Fuzzy Decision Support System for Diabetes Diagnosis

Diabetes is a serious chronic disease. The importance of clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) to diagnose diabetes has led to extensive research efforts to improve the accuracy, applicability, interpretability, and interoperability of these systems. However, this problem continues to require optimization. Fuzzy rule-based systems are suitable for the medical domain, where interpretability is a main concern. The medical domain is data-intensive, and using electronic health record data to build the FRBS knowledge base and fuzzy sets is critical. Multiple variables are frequently required to determine a correct and personalized diagnosis, which usually makes it difficult to arrive at accurate and timely decisions. In this paper, we propose and implement a new semantically interpretable FRBS framework for diabetes diagnosis. The framework uses multiple aspects of knowledge-fuzzy inference, ontology reasoning, and a fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) to provide a more intuitive and accurate design. First, we build a two-layered hierarchical and interpretable FRBS; then, we improve this by integrating an ontology reasoning process based on SNOMED CT standard ontology. We incorporate FAHP to determine the relative medical importance of each sub-FRBS. The proposed system offers numerous unique and critical improvements regarding the implementation of an accurate, dynamic, semantically intelligent, and interpretable CDSS. The designed system considers the ontology semantic similarity of diabetes complications and symptoms concepts in the fuzzy rules' evaluation process. The framework was tested using a real data set, and the results indicate how the proposed system helps physicians and patients to accurately diagnose diabetes mellitusThis work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea-Grant funded by the Korean Government (Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning)-NRF-2017R1A2B2012337)S

A Fuzzy Association Rule Mining Expert-Driven (FARME-D) approach to Knowledge Acquisition

Fuzzy Association Rule Mining Expert-Driven (FARME-D) approach to knowledge acquisition is proposed in this paper as a viable solution to the challenges of rule-based unwieldiness and sharp boundary problem in building a fuzzy rule-based expert system. The fuzzy models were based on domain experts’ opinion about the data description. The proposed approach is committed to modelling of a compact Fuzzy Rule-Based Expert Systems. It is also aimed at providing a platform for instant update of the knowledge-base in case new knowledge is discovered. The insight to the new approach strategies and underlining assumptions, the structure of FARME-D and its practical application in medical domain was discussed. Also, the modalities for the validation of the FARME-D approach were discussed

Modeling Stroke Diagnosis with the Use of Intelligent Techniques

The purpose of this work is to test the efficiency of specific intelligent classification algorithms when dealing with the domain of stroke medical diagnosis. The dataset consists of patient records of the ”Acute Stroke Unit”, Alexandra Hospital, Athens, Greece, describing patients suffering one of 5 different stroke types diagnosed by 127 diagnostic attributes / symptoms collected during the first hours of the emergency stroke situation as well as during the hospitalization and recovery phase of the patients. Prior to the application of the intelligent classifier the dimensionality of the dataset is further reduced using a variety of classic and state of the art dimensionality reductions techniques so as to capture the intrinsic dimensionality of the data. The results obtained indicate that the proposed methodology achieves prediction accuracy levels that are comparable to those obtained by intelligent classifiers trained on the original feature space

A survey on utilization of data mining approaches for dermatological (skin) diseases prediction

Due to recent technology advances, large volumes of medical data is obtained. These data contain valuable information. Therefore data mining techniques can be used to extract useful patterns. This paper is intended to introduce data mining and its various techniques and a survey of the available literature on medical data mining. We emphasize mainly on the application of data mining on skin diseases. A categorization has been provided based on the different data mining techniques. The utility of the various data mining methodologies is highlighted. Generally association mining is suitable for extracting rules. It has been used especially in cancer diagnosis. Classification is a robust method in medical mining. In this paper, we have summarized the different uses of classification in dermatology. It is one of the most important methods for diagnosis of erythemato-squamous diseases. There are different methods like Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and fuzzy classifiaction in this topic. Clustering is a useful method in medical images mining. The purpose of clustering techniques is to find a structure for the given data by finding similarities between data according to data characteristics. Clustering has some applications in dermatology. Besides introducing different mining methods, we have investigated some challenges which exist in mining skin data

Disease modelling using evolved discriminate function

Precocious diagnosis increases the survival time and patient quality of life. It is a binary classification, exhaustively studied in the literature. This paper innovates proposing the application of genetic programming to obtain a discriminate function. This function contains the disease dynamics used to classify the patients with as little false negative diagnosis as possible. If its value is greater than zero then it means that the patient is ill, otherwise healthy. A graphical representation is proposed to show the influence of each dataset attribute in the discriminate function. The experiment deals with Breast Cancer and Thrombosis & Collagen diseases diagnosis. The main conclusion is that the discriminate function is able to classify the patient using numerical clinical data, and the graphical representation displays patterns that allow understanding of the model

Disease modeling using Evolved Discriminate Function

Precocious diagnosis increases the survival time and patient quality of life. It is a binary classification, exhaustively studied in the literature. This paper innovates proposing the application of genetic programming to obtain a discriminate function. This function contains the disease dynamics used to classify the patients with as little false negative diagnosis as possible. If its value is greater than zero then it means that the patient is ill, otherwise healthy. A graphical representation is proposed to show the influence of each dataset attribute in the discriminate function. The experiment deals with Breast Cancer and Thrombosis & Collagen diseases diagnosis. The main conclusion is that the discriminate function is able to classify the patient using numerical clinical data, and the graphical representation displays patterns that allow understanding of the model