A Multilayer Perceptron-based Medical Decision Support System for Heart Disease Diagnosis

Authors

Hongmei Yan, University of Electronic Science and Technology of ChinaFollow
Yanan Jiang, University of Nevada, Las VegasFollow
Jun Zheng, Queens College, City University of New YorkFollow
Chenglin Peng, Chongqing UniversityFollow
Qinghui Li, Southwest Hospital, Chongqing

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-2006

Publication Title

Expert Systems with Applications

Volume

30

Issue

2

First page number:

272

Last page number:

281

Abstract

The medical diagnosis by nature is a complex and fuzzy cognitive process, and soft computing methods, such as neural networks, have shown great potential to be applied in the development of medical decision support systems (MDSS). In this paper, a multiplayer perceptron-based decision support system is developed to support the diagnosis of heart diseases. The input layer of the system includes 40 input variables, categorized into four groups and then encoded using the proposed coding schemes. The number of nodes in the hidden layer is determined through a cascade learning process. Each of the 5 nodes in the output layer corresponds to one heart disease of interest. In the system, the missing data of a patient are handled using the substituting mean method. Furthermore, an improved back propagation algorithm is used to train the system. A total of 352 medical records collected from the patients suffering from five heart diseases have been used to train and test the system. In particular, three assessment methods, cross validation, holdout and bootstrapping, are applied to assess the generalization of the system. The results show that the proposed MLP-based decision support system can achieve very high diagnosis accuracy (>90%) and comparably small intervals (<5%), proving its usefulness in support of clinic decision process of heart diseases.

Keywords

Back propagation (Artificial intelligence); Decision making--Computer programs; Machine learning; Medical care--Decision making

Disciplines

Analytical, Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment | Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Electrical and Computer Engineering | Theory and Algorithms

Language

English

Permissions

Use Find in Your Library, contact the author, or interlibrary loan to garner a copy of the item. Publisher policy does not allow archiving the final published version. If a post-print (author's peer-reviewed manuscript) is allowed and available, or publisher policy changes, the item will be deposited

Repository Citation

Yan, H., Jiang, Y., Zheng, J., Peng, C., Li, Q. (2006). A Multilayer Perceptron-based Medical Decision Support System for Heart Disease Diagnosis. Expert Systems with Applications, 30(2), 272-281.