[Tutor] Medical Decision-Making Question

[Jim Richardson]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 7:22 AM, Fred G <bayespokerguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello--
> I'm a pre-med student interested in decision-making as applied to medical
> decisions.  I am trying to build a medical decision-making algorithm and am
> pretty stuck on a few things.
> I've built a file that contains a list of many diseases and their associated
> symptoms.  For example, here are the column headers and two sample rows (the
> "|" = "or"):
> Disease                Symptoms
> Cold
> sore_throat|runny_nose|congestion|cough|aches|slight_fever
> Flu
> sore_throat|fever|headache|muscle_aches|soreness|congestion|cough|returning_fever
> My questions are the following:
> a)  How's the best way to make it so I can have a user type in a list of
> symptoms and then have the computer tell the user the possible diseases that
> share those symptoms? In other words, on a high-level I have a pretty good
> idea of what I want my algorithm to do-- but I need help implementing the
> basic version first.  I'd like to do the following:
>>>>Please enter a list of symptoms
>>>>[user_input]
>>>>Possible diseases include: x, y, z
> b)Once I get that working, could anyone point me to good code already
> written in Python such that I could have a model (for syntax and overall
> structure) for figuring out how to make the computer evaluate more factors
> such as: patient age, patient history, and even downloading archival data
> for patients in the same demographic group?
> Thanks!
>
>



One problem with writing the symptoms is misspelling and word choice,
is mild fever the same as slight fever? etc.

Another way to do that is to present a list, when the user selects one
item in that list, (say, fever, mild) the list is restructured to
exclude symptoms that would clash with that, like all the other
fevers.  After a while of clicking on list items, the evaluator can
make a best match against diseases.  Downside is a fair amount of
processing.

You could also group symptoms and have severity as a seperate, so you
select fever, then mild,high, whatever.

Evaluating it is going to be fun, it's a lot more than binary matches.



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