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A Statistical Classifier to Support Diagnose Meningitis in Less Developed Areas of Brazil

  • Patient Facing Systems
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Abstract

This paper describes the development of statistical classifiers to help diagnose meningococcal meningitis, i.e. the most sever, infectious and deadliest type of this disease. The goal is to find a mechanism able to determine whether a patient has this type of meningitis from a set of symptoms that can be directly observed in the earliest stages of this pathology. Currently, in Brazil, a country that is heavily affected by meningitis, all suspected cases require immediate hospitalization and the beginning of a treatment with invasive tests and medicines. This procedure, therefore, entails expensive treatments unaffordable in less developed regions. For this purpose, we have gathered together a dataset of 22,602 records of suspected meningitis cases from the Brazilian state of Bahia. Seven classification techniques have been applied from input data of nine symptoms and other information about the patient such as age, sex and the area they live in, and a 10 cross-fold validation has been performed. Results show that the techniques applied are suitable for diagnosing the meningococcal meningitis. Several indexes, such as precision, recall or ROC area, have been computed to show the accuracy of the models. All of them provide good results, but the best corresponds to the J48 classifier with a precision of 0.942 and a ROC area over 0.95. These results indicate that our model can indeed help lead to a non-invasive and early diagnosis of this pathology. This is especially useful in less developed areas, where the epidemiologic risk is usually high and medical expenses, sometimes, unaffordable.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Prof. Maria Rita Donalisio, M.D. Ph.D., Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medical Sciences (State University of Campinas), for her assistance during the first part of this research, and Prof. José-Luis Pérez-de-la-Cruz, Ph.D., Full Professor at the University of Málaga, for his comments on the early version of this paper. We would also like to show our gratitude to the National Health Service of Brazil for providing us the data used in this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto Federal de Educao, Ciência e Tecnología da Bahia, Campus Vitória da Conquista, Bahia, Brasil

    Viviane-Maria Lélis

  2. Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Informática, Universidad de Málaga, Málaga, Spain

    Eduardo Guzmán & María-Victoria Belmonte

Authors
  1. Viviane-Maria Lélis
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  2. Eduardo Guzmán
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  3. María-Victoria Belmonte
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Correspondence to María-Victoria Belmonte.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Patient Facing Systems

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Lélis, VM., Guzmán, E. & Belmonte, MV. A Statistical Classifier to Support Diagnose Meningitis in Less Developed Areas of Brazil. J Med Syst 41, 145 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-017-0785-5

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