This paper employs the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to enhance the accuracy of differential diagnosis for febrile diseases, particularly prevalent in tropical regions where misdiagnosis may have severe consequences. The migration of health workers from developing countries has resulted in frontline health workers (FHWs) using inadequate protocols for the diagnosis of complex health conditions. The study introduces an innovative AHP-based Medical Decision Support System (MDSS) incorporating disease risk factors derived from physicians' experiential knowledge to address this challenge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe report of the World Health Organization (WHO) about the poor accessibility of people living in low-to-middle-income countries to medical facilities and personnel has been a concern to both professionals and nonprofessionals in healthcare. This poor accessibility has led to high morbidity and mortality rates in tropical regions, especially when such a disease presents itself with confusable symptoms that are not easily differentiable by inexperienced doctors, such as those found in febrile diseases. This prompted the development of the fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) model to serve as a decision-support tool for medical health workers in the diagnosis of febrile diseases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis systematic literature aims to identify soft computing techniques currently utilized in diagnosing tropical febrile diseases and explore the data characteristics and features used for diagnoses, algorithm accuracy, and the limitations of current studies. The goal of this study is therefore centralized around determining the extent to which soft computing techniques have positively impacted the quality of physician care and their effectiveness in tropical disease diagnosis. The study has used PRISMA guidelines to identify paper selection and inclusion/exclusion criteria.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFComput Methods Programs Biomed
July 2011
The task of medical diagnosis is a complex one, considering the level vagueness and uncertainty management, especially when the disease has multiple symptoms. A number of researchers have utilized the fuzzy-analytic hierarchy process (fuzzy-AHP) methodology in handling imprecise data in medical diagnosis and therapy. The fuzzy logic is able to handle vagueness and unstructuredness in decision making, while the AHP has the ability to carry out pairwise comparison of decision elements in order to determine their importance in the decision process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStud Health Technol Inform
September 2010
A neuro-fuzzy decision support system is proposed for the diagnosis of heart failure. The system comprises; knowledge base (database, neural networks and fuzzy logic) of both the quantitative and qualitative knowledge of the diagnosis of heart failure, neuro-fuzzy inference engine and decision support engine. The neural networks employ a multi-layers perception back propagation learning process while the fuzzy logic uses the root sum square inference procedure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStud Health Technol Inform
September 2008
The application of the conventional symbolic rules found in knowledge base technology to the management of a disease suffers from its inability to evaluate the degree of severity of a symptom and by extension the degree of the illness. Fuzzy logic technology provides a simple way to arrive at a definite conclusion from vague, ambiguous, imprecise and noisy data (as found in medical data) using linguistic variables that are not necessary precise. In order to achieve this, a study of a knowledge base system for the management of diseases was undertaken.
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