Background: The number of people with dementia is increasing along with people's ageing trend worldwide. Therefore, there are various researches to improve a dementia diagnosis process in the field of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) technology. The most significant issue is that the evaluation processes by physician which is based on medical information for patients and questionnaire from their guardians are time consuming, subjective and prone to error. This problem can be solved by an overall data mining modeling, which subsidizes an intuitive decision of clinicians.
Methods: Therefore, in this paper we propose a quad-phased data mining modeling consisting of 4 modules. In Proposer Module, significant diagnostic criteria are selected that are effective for diagnostics. Then in Predictor Module, a model is constructed to predict and diagnose dementia based on a machine learning algorism. To help clinical physicians understand results of the predictive model better, in Descriptor Module, we interpret causes of diagnostics by profiling patient groups. Lastly, in Visualization Module, we provide visualization to effectively explore characteristics of patient groups.
Results: The proposed model is applied for CREDOS study which contains clinical data collected from 37 university-affiliated hospitals in republic of Korea from year 2005 to 2013.
Conclusions: This research is an intelligent system enabling intuitive collaboration between CAD system and physicians. And also, improved evaluation process is able to effectively reduce time and cost consuming for clinicians and patients.
Keywords: Artificial neural network; Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD); Data mining modeling; Decision tree; Dementia diagnosis; Support vector machine; Tree visualization; Variable selection.