Uncovering the hidden relation between air pollution and ischemic heart disease: Experience from Tehran

Nowadays, air pollution is one of the pressing environmental issues, and it causes different diseases especially cardiac and respiratory ones. The relation between air pollutants (including PM10, PM2.5, CO, SO2, NO2, and O3) and heart-pulmonary diseases (ischemic, angina, pneumonia, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)) is studied in Tehran, the most polluted city of Iran. Air quality data related to all pollutants PM10, PM2.5, CO, SO2, NO2, and O3 have been gathered. The relation between the pollutants and the number of admitted heart-pulmonary diseases patients is modeled by using radial basis function (RBF), multilayer perceptron (MLP) networks, and ANFIS in terms of MSE and correlation coefficient. In each network, pollutants are assumed as inputs, and heart-pulmonary diseases are considered as an output of the network. The experiments show that the ANFIS network has more accuracy than MLP and RBF. Moreover, the obtained results in the ANFIS network show that the correlation coefficient between ischemic and NO2, angina and CO, pneumonia and PM10 and COPD and (PM10 & PM2.5) respectively are 0.7229, 0.7006, 0.81 and (0.7280 & 0.7249).