A multiple multilayer perceptron neural network with an adaptive learning algorithm for thyroid disease diagnosis in the internet of medical things

Abstract

Medical information systems such as Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) are gained special attention over recent years. X-ray and MRI images are important sources of information to be examined for a particular type of anomalies. Reports based on the images and laboratory examination results could be mined with machine learning techniques as well. Thyroid disease diagnosis is an important capability of medical information systems. The main objective of this study is to improve the diagnosis accuracy of thyroid diseases from semantic reports and examination results using artificial neural network (ANN) in IoMT systems. In order to improve generalization and avoid over-fitting of ANN during the training process, a set of multiple multilayer perceptron (MMLP) neural network with the back-propagation error ability is proposed in this paper. Moreover, an adaptive learning rate algorithm is used to deal with the slow convergence and the local minima problem of the back-propagation error algorithm. The proposed MMLP significantly increased the overall accuracy of thyroid disease classification. With MMLP with a set of 6 networks, an improvement of 0.7% accuracy is achieved compared to a single network. In addition, comparing to the standard back-propagation, by using an adaptive learning rate algorithm in the proposed MMLP, an improvement of 4.6% accuracy and the final accuracy of 99% have been obtained in IoMT systems. The proposed MMLP is compared to recent researches reported for thyroid disease diagnosis, and its superiority is shown.