The impact of data mining techniques on medical diagnostics

Abstract

Medical data mining has great potential for exploring the hidden patterns in the data sets of the medical domain. These patterns can be utilized for clinical diagnosis. However, the available raw medical data are widely distributed, heterogeneous in nature, and voluminous. These data need to be collected in an organized form. This collected data can be then integrated to form a hospital information system. Data mining technology provides a user-oriented approach to novel and hidden patterns in the data. Data mining and statistics both strive towards discovering patterns and structures in data. Statistics deals with heterogeneous numbers only, whereas data mining deals with heterogeneous fields. We identify a few areas of healthcare where these techniques can be applied to healthcare databases for knowledge discovery. In this paper we briefly examine the impact of data mining techniques, including artificial neural networks, on medical diagnostics.