Using the Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Diagnosing of intensity of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease by Clinical Parameters

Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) is one of the most prevalent liver diseases with several levels of severity. Recently, the FibroScan device has been used as a non-invasive method for measurement of elasticity of the liver and consequently its fattiness. The current study aimed at providing a low-cost and simple method for diagnosing of the disease through the clinical symptoms.
A collection of data obtained from 726 patients was used for conducting this study with each patient having a fatty liver disease with different levels of intensity. The severity of the disease for each patient was measured by FibroScan device along with medical tests and ultrasound monitoring. Then, the artificial neural networks were used for determination of the relationship between the data obtained from the patients and the intensity levels. Finally, by the aid of artificial intelligence techniques, a method is employed for extracting rules from artificial neural networks for representing the relationship between the data.
According to the results obtained from FibroScan device, among the 726 patients, 5 were located in F4 class, 23 in F3 class, 132 in F2class, 151 in F1, and 415 in F0 Class (Healthy people). According to the proposed method, the accuracy of diagnosis for various classes is as follows: 100% for F4 class, 99.31% for F3 class, 93.94% for F2 class, and 80.58% for F1 Class. Accordingly, this method can identify the samples in F4 and F3 classes with an ideal accuracy and the samples in F1 and F2 classes with a good accuracy.
Results in this research indicate that the proposed method can be used for diagnosing NAFLD and identifying its intensity levels with a lower costs and easier accessibility. It extracts the required rules for diagnosing the dieses that can be used by the physicians in their diagnosis.