Developing a decision support system for osteoporosis Prediction

  Osteoporosis is a common disease in women. Osteoporosis fractures may cause irreparable damages; therefore, early diagnosis and treatment before fractures is an important issue. The ojectiveof this study was to develop a decision support system for diagnosing osteoporosis using artificial neural networks. This developmental study has been done in second half of 2017 based on crossectional method. In present study initially Osteoporosis affecting clinical factors were identified and the most significant clinical factors were selected through incorporation of a questionnaire-based survey. Subsequently, information of 256 female participants and their BMD test results, five years after initial data entry were used to train neural network. The information was obtained fromwomen who refered to department of Bone Mineral Densityof oushehr university of medical sciences. In order to identify the best network, trial and error method was used and neural networks with different topologies were trained using Scaled Conjugate Gradient and Levenberg-Marquardt algorithms. Confusion matrix was used to evaluate the network’s accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. In the first stage, out of 15 essential variables, 12 variables were selected as the most important risk factors. Multilayer perceptron neural network was designed. Results showed that the best structure of network was due to Scaled Conjugate Gradient algorithm with 10 neurons and Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm with 12 neurons in hidden layer. Accuracy comparison was showed that generally Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm had better result. The best sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy was 83.1%, 89.4%, and 86.3% respectively. In this study developed a diagnostic tool based on local data that could be effective in tracking osteoporosis. Utilizing such a diagnostic tool as a timely referral of individuals and initiating therapy as soon as possible may prevent fractures from occurring and help avoiding the frequent complications of osteoporosis.