Chapter 6 - Fuzzy PROMETHEE–based evaluation of skin cancer treatment techniques

Abstract

Skin cancer largely is caused by exposure to UV radiation, which damages our cells’ DNA, from the sun or from tanning beds. Most skin cancers appear in areas that are often exposed to sunlight, such as our hands, legs, face, neck, and ears. Skin cancer can be treated using various treatment techniques, which include a variety of surgical methods such as Mohs surgery, cryosurgery, laser surgery, or other methods, such as radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and targeted therapy. This chapter focuses on collecting various criteria of different skin cancer treatment methods and using these criteria to compute the most suitable treatment method using fuzzy preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE). The treatment methods are pinned against cost, dosages (if any), survival rates, advantages, disadvantages, side effects, as well as recovery and treatment times, to come up with the best alternative. The research managed to separately rank the treatment techniques into three groups: surgical techniques, nonsurgical techniques, and combined results for the surgical and nonsurgical techniques. Among the surgical methods, cryosurgery was found to be the best option, followed by excision, Mohs surgery, curettage and electrodesication, laser surgery, and dermabrasion, respectively. While photodynamic therapy ranked first for the nonsurgical options followed by chemotherapy, brachytherapy, immunotherapy, external beam radiation therapy, and targeted therapy, respectively. An observation on the analysis of the combined results based on the fuzzy data shows that the surgical approach is a better option than nonsurgical methods. It can be concluded that there are many variations that may determine the best treatment alternative for skin cancer, and fuzzy PROMETHEE allows us to be able to use these variations to compute the best treatment option for a patient.