A high performance system for the diagnosis of headache via hybrid machine learning model

Abstract

Headache has been a major concern for patients, medical doctors, clinics and hospitals over the years due to several factors. Headache is categorized into two major types: (1) Primary Headache, which can be tension, cluster or migraine, and (2) Secondary Headache where further medical evaluation must be considered. This work presents a high performance Headache Prediction Support System (HPSS). HPSS provides preliminary guidance for patients, medical students and even clinicians for initial headache diagnosis. The mechanism of HPSS is based on a hybrid machine learning model. First, 19 selected attributes (questions) were chosen carefully by medical specialists according to the most recent International Classification of Headache Disorders (ICHD-3) criteria. Then, a questionnaire was prepared to confidentially collect data from real patients under the supervision of specialized clinicians at different hospitals in Jordan. Later, a hybrid solution consisting of clustering and classification was employed to emphasize the diagnosis results obtained by clinicians and to predict headache type for new patients respectively. Twenty-six (26) different classification algorithms were applied on 614 patients' records. The highest accuracy was obtained by integrating K-Means and Random Forest with a migraine accuracy of 99.1% and an overall accuracy of 93%. Our web-based interface was developed over the hybrid model to enable patients and clinicians to use our system in the most convenient way. This work provides a comparative study of different headache diagnosis systems via 9 different performance metrics. Our hybrid model shows a great potential for highly accurate headache prediction. HPSS was used by different patients, medical students, and clinicians with a very positive feedback. This work evaluates and ranks the impact of headache symptoms on headache diagnosis from a machine learning perspective. This can help medical experts for further headache criteria improvements.