In this paper, we explore the possibility to apply machine learning to make
diagnostic predictions using discomfort drawings. A discomfort drawing is an
intuitive way for patients to express discomfort and pain related symptoms.
These drawings have proven to be an effective method to collect patient data
and make diagnostic decisions in real-life practice. A dataset from real-world
patient cases is collected for which medical experts provide diagnostic labels.
Next, we use a factorized multimodal topic model, Inter-Battery Topic Model
(IBTM), to train a system that can make diagnostic predictions given an unseen
discomfort drawing. The number of output diagnostic labels is determined by
using mean-shift clustering on the discomfort drawing. Experimental results
show reasonable predictions of diagnostic labels given an unseen discomfort
drawing. Additionally, we generate synthetic discomfort drawings with IBTM
given a diagnostic label, which results in typical cases of symptoms. The
positive result indicates a significant potential of machine learning to be
used for parts of the pain diagnostic process and to be a decision support
system for physicians and other health care personnel.Comment: Presented at 2016 Machine Learning and Healthcare Conference (MLHC
2016), Los Angeles, C