Development of an expert system for pre-diagnosis of hypertension, diabetes mellitus type 2 and metabolic syndrome

Abstract

This study involved the development of an expert system for the pre-diagnosis of hypertension, diabetes mellitus type 2 and metabolic syndrome. The expert system has been developed using web technologies, PHP, Apache and MySQL with CLIPS tool; the expert system includes three algorithms designed by the authors, one for each disease. The objective of this study is to provide an expert system capable of performing a pre-diagnosis for early detection of hypertension, diabetes mellitus type 2 and metabolic syndrome. The methodology to build the system consists in associated risk factors, clinical variables diagnosis criteria based on World Health Organization standards in three algorithms and then develop a program that interacts with users, besides the expert system is compared with the existing expert systems in order to show its originality and innovation. The rules of systems are designed using CLIPS systems and the Architecture Apache, MySQL and PHP for the user interface and database. The system was validated by 72 patient(s) and 3 real doctors, the total result over 72 patient(s) is low risk 16.6 percent, moderate risk 30.5 percent, moderate high risk 13.8 percent, high risk 23.6 percent, very high risk 15.2 percent, and the doctors’ feedback was similar to that shown by the system. The number of rules to create the algorithms and the criteria used were adequate and sufficient to obtain the pre-diagnosis of each disease; in addition, the languages used to design and create the web application were stable. All users who used the system obtained similar results to those obtained by doctors.