Identification of Diabetic Patients through Clinical and Para-Clinical Features in Mexico: An Approach Using Deep Neural Networks

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2019 Jan 29;16(3):381. doi: 10.3390/ijerph16030381.

Abstract

Diabetes is a chronic and noncommunicable but preventable disease that is affecting the Mexican population at worrying levels, being the first place in prevalence worldwide. Early diabetes detection has become important to prevent other health conditions that involve low organ yield until the patient death. Based on this problem, this work proposes the architecture of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for the automated classification of healthy patients from diabetics patients. The analysis was performed used a set of 19 para-clinical features to determine the health status of the patients. The developed model was evaluated through a statistical analysis based on the calculation of the loss function, accuracy, area under the curve (AUC) and receiving operating characteristics (ROC) curve. The results obtained present statistically significant values, with accuracy of 0.94 and AUC values of 0.98. Based on these results, it is possible to conclude that the ANN implemented in this work can classify patients with presence of diabetes from controls with significant accuracy, presenting preliminary results for the development of a diagnostic tool that can be supportive for health specialists.

Keywords: Artificial Neural Network; computer-aided diagnosis; net reclassification improvement; statistical analysis; type 2 diabetes.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Area Under Curve
  • Diabetes Mellitus / diagnosis*
  • Early Diagnosis
  • Female
  • Health Status
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Mexico
  • Middle Aged
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • ROC Curve