Article

To design a medical decision support system (MDSS) that would accurately predict
the rehabilitation protocols prescribed by the physicians for patients with knee
osteoarthritis (OA) using only their demographic and clinical characteristics.
The demographic and clinical variables for 170 patients receiving one of three
treatment protocols for knee OA were entered into the MDSS. Demographic variables
in the model were age and sex. Clinical variables entered into the model were
height, weight, BMI, affected side, severity of knee OA, and severity of pain.
All patients in the study received one of three treatment protocols for patients
with knee OA: (a) hot packs, followed by electrotherapy and exercise, (b) ice
packs, followed by ultrasound and exercise and (c) exercise alone. The resilient
back propagation artificial neural network algorithm was used, with a ten-fold
cross-validation. It was estimated that the MDSS is able to accurately predict
the treatment prescribed by the physician for 87% of the patients. We developed
an artificial neural network-based decision support system that can viably aid
physicians in determining which treatment protocol would best match the
anthropometric and clinical characteristics of patients with knee OA.

Langue : ANGLAIS