Accuracy of intelligent medical systems

Intelligent medical systems are a special kind of medical software in general, and just as any medical software system they should make accurate presumptions. However, accuracy of intelligent medical systems is highly dependent on various factors such as: choosing an appropriate basic method (i.e. decision trees, neural networks), induction method (i.e. purity measures) and appropriate support methods (i.e. discretization, pruning, boosting). In this paper we present the results of extensive research of the above alternatives on 54 UCI databases and their influence on the accuracy of decision trees, which constitute one of the most desirable forms of intelligent medical systems. We also introduce new hybrid purity measures that on some databases outperform other purity measures. The results presented here show that the selection of the right purity measure with the proper discretization method and application of the boosting method can really make a difference in terms of higher accuracy of induced decision trees. Thereafter choosing the appropriate factors that can increase the accuracy of the induced decision tree is a very demanding and time-consuming task.