Track: Healthcare Systems

Abstract

The present study aimed to develop a new method in fuzzy logic which can be used for kidney disease diagnosis. To this aim, across-sectional descriptive study was conducted in Shafa kidney clinic in Tehran, Iran in 2012. The medical diagnosis fuzzy rules were formulated and applied using MATLAB software. We defined a set of symptoms (F) related to the set of considered diseases. The input case to be diagnosed was defined by giving a fuzzy value to each symptom. The fuzzy inference was applied to obtain a decision fuzzy set for each disease, and crisp decision values were attained to tell the certainty of existence for each disease. The results indicated that in the diagnosis of eight cases of kidney diseases through the examination of 21 indicators using fuzzy logic, kidney stone disease with 63% certainty was at the first level and renal tubular with 15% was at the lowest level and the other kidney diseases were at the other levels. The most obvious finding of the current study was that the results of the kidney disease diagnosis (e.g. kidney stone) via fuzzy logic were fully compatible with those of kidney physicians. Therefore, fuzzy logic is a valid, reliable and flexible instrument to diagnose several typical input cases.The developed system decreases the effort of initial physical checking and manual feeding of the input symptoms.

Keywords: Chronic kidney disease, Fuzzy logic, Fuzzy medical diagnosis, Medical diagnosis problems.