A semantic-based approach for hepatitis C virus prediction and diagnosis using a fuzzy ontology and a fuzzy Bayesian network

Abstract

Medical decisions, especially when diagnosing Hepatitis C, are challenging to make as they often have to be based on uncertain and fuzzy information. In most cases, that puts doctors in complex yet uncertain decision-making situations. Therefore, it would be more suitable for doctors to use a semantically intelligent system that mimics the doctor’s thinking and enables fast Hepatitis C diagnosis. Fuzzy ontologies have been used to remedy the shortcomings of classical ontologies by using fuzzy logic, which allows dealing with fuzzy knowledge in ontologies. Moreover, Fuzzy Bayesian networks are well-known and widely used to represent and analyze uncertain medical data. This paper presents a system that combines fuzzy ontologies and Bayesian networks to diagnose Hepatitis C. The system uses a fuzzy ontology to represent sequences of uncertain and fuzzy data about patients and some features relevant to Hepatitis C diagnosis, enabling more reusable and interpretable datasets. In addition, we propose a novel semantic diagnosis process based on a fuzzy Bayesian network as an inference engine. We conducted an experimental study on 615 real cases to validate the proposed system. The experimentation allowed us to compare the results of existing machine learning algorithms for the Hepatitis C diagnosis with the results of our proposed system. Our solution shows promising results and proves effective for fast medical assistance.