An Online Doctor's and Patient help Desk Assistant for Early Diagnoses of Prostate Cancer in the Rural Areas of Bayelsa State

Abstract

The shortage and unavailability of medical practitioners particularly medical doctors in the world has created deficiency in the health sector, which is even more prevalent in the developing countries. This has made rural dwellers in developing countries to experience chronic diseases like prostate cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer and so on which leads to mortality and disabilities. Prostate cancer is a male disease that occurs in the malignant tumors of the prostate epithelium. In this paper, we present an online doctor’s and patient help desk assistant for the diagnoses of prostate cancer at its early stage in the rural areas where there are no health professionals. The system offers medical assistance to patients by providing diagnostic information of their status based on a set of questions answered with respect to prostate cancer. The system is developed with Java Expert System Shell (JESS) alongside other web programming tools. The result from the system evaluation with 50 participants show greater than 95 percent accuracy on expert confirmation.