Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) Model for the Diagnosis of Urinary Tract Infections in Emergency Care Patients

Abstract

Significance of machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) techniques and the availability of Electronic Health Records (EHR) has motivated the need of automated diagnosis system. Furthermore, this development has transformed the health care systems. Recently, several ML and DL models has been proposed for various diseases and has shown the significant outcomes as well. Unfortunately, Urinary tract infections (UTI) is among the minor diseases that is not investigated a lot interms of diagnosing using computation intelligence techniques. However, these models lack the reliability due to the black box nature of the highly complex logic model. Therefore, we attempt to develop an interpretable deep learning (DL) model for the diagnosis of UTI using the dataset of emergency department (ED) patients from UK. Several sets of experiments were conducted using complete dataset, reduced attribute set identified using recursive feature elimination (RFE) and using the attributes identified by the baseline study. The proposed DL model has improved the baseline study accuracy from 0.875 to 0.9275 for 184 feature and 0.859 to 0.943 for the reduced feature. Furthermore, the model has outperformed interms of sensitivity and specificity as well. Due to the data imbalance positive predicted value (PPV), negative predicted value (NPV) and Youden Index was also used for evaluating the performance of the model. The proposed DL model has achieved the highest outcome using 18 attributes selected with RFE technique. The proposed model will produce reliability in the diagnosis made by the model and provide confidence to the doctors to adopt the system in the real life.