Classification of Congenital Hypothyroidism using Artificial Neural Networks

Year: 2013       Vol.: 62       No.: 2      

Authors: Iris Ivy Gauran; Ma. Sofia Criselda A. Poblador

Abstract:

The Newborn Screening Reference Center (NSRC) of the National Health Institute in University of the Philippines Manila collects measurements from five attributes to determine whether Congenital Hypothyroidism (CH) is present in a neonate. Detecting the CH cases is a major concern of medical practitioners because it provides richer information than the healthy ones. However, because of the rarity of this metabolic condition, existing classification algorithms oftentimes misclassify a newborn as “normal” even if it is not. This paper investigates the efficiency of Self-Organizing Kohonen Maps (SOM), a type of artificial neural network. Though it is a visualization and clustering tool, the researchers want to probe on its ability to detect outliers and properly classify a newborn as normal or not by coming up with a statistically computed threshold value. Instead of working directly with the original attributes of the data, a reduced set of SOM prototypes is utilized to represent the data in a space of smaller dimension, seeking to preserve the probability distribution and topology of the input space. Results showed a misclassification rate of 13.5%. Though it is found to be slightly less superior to the existing classification rules, the proposed methodology was able to address the problem of finding a statistical threshold value. Also, the methodology verifies that age has a major effect on misclassifying “Normal” as “Abnormal” since postponement of newborn screening to a later age causes the quantization error to boost drastically, hence, easily exceeding the value of the first decision threshold.

Keywords: self-organizing kohonen maps (SOM), classification algorithm, outlier detection, newborn screening for congenital hypothyroidism

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