Machine Learning: A Means of Diagnosing and Prescribing Treatments for Tuberculosis Patients

Abstract

Abstract-Tuberculosis (TB) remains one of the leading health problems in the Philippines. Although curable, many Filipinos cannot afford the cost of treatment. Furthermore, the free services offered by the public health centers are insufficient to attend to the medical needs of those seeking help. In this paper, the researchers present the system that can assist doctors, nurses and health workers in diagnosing tuberculosis using techniques in machine learning through applying ID3 algorithm. Interviews with several experts in the field of TB were conducted in order to gather data that were used to populate the system's knowledge base. Test result show that the system is capable of prescribing treatments based on the patient's data and tracking the progress of the patient based on his/her prescribed treatment.

Decision Support for Diagnosing Thyroid Diseases using Machine Learning

“…Machine learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence. It focuses on algorithms and methods which provide a possible way for a computer to learn via existing examples by capturing characteristics of interest based on underlying probability distribution [4]. Machine Learning aims at providing computational methods for accumulating, changing, and updating knowledge in intelligent systems, and in particular learning mechanisms that will help to generate knowledge from examples or data.…”

“…At present, there are huge number of successful applications which use neural networks. James E. Avenir et al [4] explored the ways to assist health workers in diagnosing and prescribing treatment to patients with tuberculosis using machine learning techniques. They used the decision tree algorithm called ID3 algorithm to build the system.…”