Screening for active pulmonary tuberculosis: Development and applicability of artificial neural network models - 19/07/18
Abstract |
Tuberculosis (TB) remains a significant public health challenge, motivated by the diversity of healthcare epidemiological settings, as other factors. Cost-effective screening has substantial importance for TB control, demanding new diagnostic tools. This paper proposes a decision support tool (DST) for screening pulmonary TB (PTB) patients at a secondary clinic. The DST is composed of an adaptive resonance model (iART) for risk group identification (low, medium and high) and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network for classifying patients as active or inactive PTB. Our tool attains an overall sensitivity (SE) and specificity (SP) of 92% (95% CI; 79–97) and 58% (95% CI; 47–68), respectively. SE values for smear-positive and smear-negative patients are 96% (95% CI; 80–99) and 82% (95% CI; 52–95), as well as higher than 83% (95% CI; 43–97) in low and high-risk cases. Even in scenarios with prevalence up to 20%, negative predictive values superior to 95% are obtained. The proposed DST provides a quick and low-cost pretest for presumptive PTB patients, which is useful to guide confirmatory testing and patient management, especially in settings with limited resources in low and middle-incoming countries.
Le texte complet de cet article est disponible en PDF.Keywords : Tuberculosis, Decision support systems, Diagnosis, Neural network models
Plan
Vol 111
P. 94-101 - juillet 2018 Retour au numéroBienvenue sur EM-consulte, la référence des professionnels de santé.
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