A Predictive E-Health Information System: Diagnosing Diabetes Mellitus Using Neural Network Based Decision Support System

Diabetes Mellitus is a chronic disease and a major cause of several severe complications and death in both developing and developed countries. The number of diabetes cases world-wide has been climbed up drastically over last decades. Hence, it was of utmost important to manage this illness and to develop tools that help clinicians do their job professionally. Artificial neural networks play a major role herein. In this research, a clinical decision support system that helps in diagnosing diabetes has been developed. The system was implemented using a multilayer perceptron artificial neural network. Due to the fact that there is no systematic way to follow in order to determine the number of hidden layers and neurons in MLP, an algorithm was proposed and followed based on the rules-of-thumb previously defined around this issue. As a result, two different topologies were trained and verified using cross validation technique. The topology that exhibited the best averaged accuracy was that of one hidden layer. The data set was obtained from King Abdullah University Hospital in Jordan.