A machine learning approach to differentiating bacterial from viral meningitis

Clinical reports indicate that differentiating bacterial from viral (aseptic) meningitis is still a difficult issue, compounded by factors such as age and time of presentation. Clinicians routinely rely on the results from blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to discriminate bacterial from viral meningitis. Tests such as the CSF Gram stain performed prior to broad-spectrum antibiotic treatment yield sensitivities between 60 and 92%. Sensitivity can be increased by performing additional laboratory testing, but the results are never completely accurate and are not cost effective in many cases. In this study, we wished to determine if a machine learning approach, based on rough sets and a probabilistic neural network could be used to differentiate between viral and bacterial meningitis. We analysed a clinical dataset containing records for 581 cases of acute bacterial or viral meningitis. The rough sets approach was used to perform dimensionality reduction in addition to classification. The results were validated using a probabilistic neural network. With an overall accuracy of 98%, these results indicate rough sets is a useful approach to differentiating bacterial from viral meningitis

A breast cancer diagnosis system: a combined approach using rough sets and probabilistic neural networks

In this paper, we present a medical decision support system based on a hybrid approach utilising rough sets and a probabilistic neural network. We utilised the ability of rough sets to perform dimensionality reduction to eliminate redundant attributes from a biomedical dataset. We then utilised a probabilistic neural network to perform supervised classification. Our results indicate that rough sets was able to reduce the number of attributes in the dataset by 67% without sacrificing classification accuracy. Our classification accuracy results yielded results on the order of 93%

Ensemble-based methods for forecasting census in hospital units

BACKGROUND: The ability to accurately forecast census counts in hospital departments has considerable implications for hospital resource allocation. In recent years several different methods have been proposed forecasting census counts, however many of these approaches do not use available patient-specific information. METHODS: In this paper we present an ensemble-based methodology for forecasting the census under a framework that simultaneously incorporates both (i) arrival trends over time and (ii) patient-specific baseline and time-varying information. The proposed model for predicting census has three components, namely: current census count, number of daily arrivals and number of daily departures. To model the number of daily arrivals, we use a seasonality adjusted Poisson Autoregressive (PAR) model where the parameter estimates are obtained via conditional maximum likelihood. The number of daily departures is predicted by modeling the probability of departure from the census using logistic regression models that are adjusted for the amount of time spent in the census and incorporate both patient-specific baseline and time varying patient-specific covariate information. We illustrate our approach using neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) data collected at Women & Infants Hospital, Providence RI, which consists of 1001 consecutive NICU admissions between April 1st 2008 and March 31st 2009. RESULTS: Our results demonstrate statistically significant improved prediction accuracy for 3, 5, and 7 day census forecasts and increased precision of our forecasting model compared to a forecasting approach that ignores patient-specific information. CONCLUSIONS: Forecasting models that utilize patient-specific baseline and time-varying information make the most of data typically available and have the capacity to substantially improve census forecasts

A statistical evaluation of neural computing approaches to predict recurrent events in breast cancer

Breast cancer is considered to be the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women today. Sometimes, breast cancer can return after primary treatment. A medical diagnosis of recurrent cancer is often more challenging task than the initial one. In this paper we investigate the potential contribution of intelligent neural networks as a useful tool to support health professionals in diagnosing such events. The neural network algorithms are applied to the breast cancer dataset obtained from Ljubljana Oncology Institute. An extensive statistical analysis has been performed to verify our experiments. The results show that a simple network structure for both the multi-layer perception and radial basis function can produce equally good results, not all attributes are needed to train these algorithms and finally, the classification performances of both algorithms are statistically robust