A Belief Rule Based Expert System to Assess Tuberculosis under Uncertainty

Fatema-Tuj-Johora Fatema-Tuj-Johora,Mohammad Shahadat Hossain,Karl Andersson,Faisal Ahmed

doi:10.1007/s10916-017-0685-8

Fatema-Tuj-Johora Fatema-Tuj-Johora, Mohammad Shahadat Hossain + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-017-0685-8

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Abstract

The primary diagnosis of Tuberculosis (TB) is usually carried out by looking at the various signs and symptoms of a patient. However, these signs and symptoms cannot be measured with 100 % certainty since they are associated with various types of uncertainties such as vagueness, imprecision, randomness, ignorance and incompleteness. Consequently, traditional primary diagnosis, based on these signs and symptoms, which is carried out by the physicians, cannot deliver reliable results. Therefore, this article presents the design, development and applications of a Belief Rule Based Expert System (BRBES) with the ability to handle various types of uncertainties to diagnose TB. The knowledge base of this system is constructed by taking experts’ suggestions and by analyzing historical data of TB patients. The experiments, carried out, by taking the data of 100 patients demonstrate that the BRBES’s generated results are more reliable than that of human expert as well as fuzzy rule based expert system.

Highlights

Tuberculosis (TB) is considered as one of the life threatening infectious diseases all over the world, usually, caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis
To demonstrate the applicability and the reliability of the Belief Rule Based Expert System (BRBES) to diagnose tuberculosis (TB), the system fed with the input data received from the TB patients of a hospital located in the Chittagong City of Bangladesh (Fig. 4)
In order to compare the reliability of the BRBES’s results a Fuzzy Rule Based Expert System (FRBES) to measure the suspicion level of TB developed in MatLab environment and the results generated for the same data by using FRBES are recorded in Column 10

Summary

Introduction

Tuberculosis (TB) is considered as one of the life threatening infectious diseases all over the world, usually, caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis It is usually two types, namely Pulmonary TB (PTB) and Extra-pulmonary TB (ETB). The TB bacteria are usually encapsulated as tiny capsules, called tubercles, in the people with healthy immune system This stage is known as latent TB. The sputum smear microscopy, which is a method to diagnose the presence of active TB, sometimes it is unable to detect This is an example of uncertainty due to incompleteness. Since the traditional way of determining suspicion of TB is usually carried out by the physicians by looking at the signs and symptoms, it does not consider the above uncertain phenomenon. Section “Results and discussion” includes the results and discussion, while “Conclusion” concludes the article

Literature review

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43 Page 6 of 11 Table 2 Input Transformation

Results and discussion

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Conclusion