Expert System for Diagnosis of Malaria and Typhoid

Abstract

An expert system is a computer program designed to solve problems in a domain that has human expertise. The knowledge built into the system is usually obtained from experts in the field. Based on this knowledge, an expert system can replicate the thinking process of the human experts and make logical deductions accordingly. Malaria and Typhoid are major health challenge in our society today (Nigeria), its symptoms can lead to other illness which include prolonged fever, fatigue, headaches, nausea, abdominal pain and constipation or diarrhea. People in endemic areas are at risk of contracting both infections concurrently. According to the world malaria report 2011, there were about 216 million cases of malaria and typhoid and estimated 655,000 deaths in 2010. (WHO report, 2011). The main challenging issue confronting the healthcare is lack of quality of service at minimal cost implying from diagnosing to predicting patients correctly. This issue can sometimes lead to an unfortunate clinical decision that can result in devastating consequences that are unacceptable. Although many studies were carried out by different researchers in the medical domain using various data techniques. In this research work, an efficient expert system that diagnoses patients with malaria and typhoid was developed. A secondary data was collected from university of Maiduguri teaching hospital for the period of four years which ranges from 2017 to 2020. The work explored the potential benefits of proposing a new model for prediction and diagnosis of malaria and typhoid using symptoms. The model adopted the Naive bayes and was implemented using the python. The system diagnoses a patient in real time (within 30 minutes) without necessarily visiting the laboratory for a test. Three algorithms were used these are, Support vector machine, Artificial neural network and Naïve bayes. From our finding, it is observed that Naïve bayes and support vector machine give the best result which is 100% in terms of accuracy of diagnosis. Keywords: Diagnosis, Prediction, Expert System, Typhoid, Malaria