Use of data mining to predict human diseases
In this project, we intend to make an intelligent agent that asks the user about their medical symptoms and tries to predict the most probable diseases/medical conditions that they might be suffering from. Based on the results, it can also direct the user/patient to go to pharmacy or consult a doctor or to go for medical emergency services. It is truly said that “Prevention Is Better Than Cure”. Sometimes diseases like cancers have very minor symptoms in the early stages but if detected this could save a patient’s life. There is no harm in taking preventive medical advice than regretting later. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) is currently a ‘hot’ research area in medicine and it is believed that they will receive extensive application to biomedical systems in the next few years. An application called the “Instant Physician” trained an auto associative memory neural network to store a large number of medical records. After training, the net can be presented with input consisting of a set of symptoms; it will then find the full stored pattern that represents the “best” diagnosis and treatment. This product can be useful for various users such as: 1. General Population/Patients a. This can act as a preliminary advice mechanism for patients before they consult a doctor. b. They can get suggestions as to whether they need to consult a doctor, or a visit to the local pharmacy would be fine for them. 2. Medical Professionals a. To speed up the process of diagnosis and to reduce human errors involved in finding the possible ailments. 3. Medical Undergraduate/Students a. To understand the common diseases and the symptoms related to them. b. To understand all possible medical conditions which could be present in the patient who is exhibiting a said symptom. 4. Hospitals a. Based on the diagnosis, hospital websites can display their specialist doctors that the patients can visit.
