A case-base fuzzification process: diabetes diagnosis case study

Abstract

Medical case-based reasoning (CBR) systems require the handling of vague or imprecise data. The fuzzy set theory is particularly suitable for this purpose. This paper proposes a case-base preparation framework for CBR systems, which converts the electronic health record medical data into fuzzy CBR knowledge. It generates fuzzy case-base knowledge by suggesting a standard crisp entity–relationship data model for CBR case-base. The resulting data model is fuzzified using a proposed relational data model fuzzification methodology. The performances of this methodology and its resulting fuzzy case-base structure are evaluated. Diabetes diagnosis is used as a case study. A set of 60 real diabetic cases is used in the study. A fuzzy CBR system is implemented to check the diagnoses accuracy. It combines the resulting fuzzy case-base with a proposed fuzzy similarity measure. Experimental results indicate that the proposed fuzzy CBR method is superior to traditional CBR and other machine-learning methods. Our fuzzy CBR achieves an accuracy of 95%, a precision of 96%, a recall 97.96%, an f-measure of 96.97%, a specificity of 81.82%, and good robustness for dealing with vagueness. The resulting fuzzy case-base relational database enhances the representation of case-base knowledge, the performance of retrieval algorithms, and the querying capabilities of CBR systems.