Abstract
The healthcare industry collects huge amounts of healthcare data which, unfortunately, are not ";mined"; to discover hidden information for effective decision making. Discovery of hidden patterns and relationships often goes unexploited. Advanced data mining techniques can help remedy this situation. This research has developed a prototype Intelligent Heart Disease Prediction System (IHDPS) using data mining techniques, namely, Decision Trees, Naive Bayes and Neural Network. Results show that each technique has its unique strength in realizing the objectives of the defined mining goals. IHDPS can answer complex ";what if"; queries which traditional decision support systems cannot. Using medical profiles such as age, sex, blood pressure and blood sugar it can predict the likelihood of patients getting a heart disease. It enables significant knowledge, e.g. patterns, relationships between medical factors related to heart disease, to be established. IHDPS is Web-based, user-friendly, scalable, reliable and expandable. It is implemented on the .NET platform.
1. Motivation
A major challenge facing healthcare organizations (hospitals, medical centers) is the provision of quality services at affordable costs. Quality service implies diagnosing patients correctly and administering treatments that are effective. Poor clinical decisions can lead to disastrous consequences which are therefore unacceptable. Hospitals must also minimize the cost of clinical tests. They can achieve these results by employing appropriate computer-based information and/or decision support systems.
Most hospitals today employ some sort of hospital information systems to manage their healthcare or patient data [12]. These systems typically generate huge amounts of data which take the form of numbers, text, charts and images. Unfortunately, these data are rarely used to support clinical decision making. There is a wealth of hidden information in these data that is largely untapped. This raises an important question: “How can we turn data into useful information that can enable healthcare practitioners to make intelligent clinical decisions?” This is the main motivation for this research.
