Fuzzy Logic System for Classifying Multiple Sclerosis Patients as High, Medium, or Low Responders to Interferon-Beta

Abstract

Interferon-beta is one of the most widely prescribed disease-modifying therapies for multiple sclerosis patients. However, this treatment is only partially effective, and a significant proportion of patients do not respond to this drug. This paper proposes an alternative fuzzy logic system, based on the opinion of a neurology expert, to classify relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis patients as high, medium, or low responders to interferon-beta. Also, a pipeline prediction model trained with biomarkers associated with interferon-beta responses is proposed, for predicting whether patients are potential candidates to be treated with this drug, in order to avoid ineffective therapies. The classification results showed that the fuzzy system presented 100% efficiency, compared to an unsupervised hierarchical clustering method (52%). So, the performance of the prediction model was evaluated, and 0.8 testing accuracy was achieved. Hence, a pipeline model, including data standardization, data compression, and a learning algorithm, could be a useful tool for getting reliable predictions about responses to interferon-beta.