Diagnosis of heart disease using data mining techniques: A systematic review of influential factors and outcomes

Heart disease is a major public health concern with millions of reported deaths annually. Data mining techniques have received attention in recent years as a tool aiding diagnosis and prediction of heart disease cases. This systematic review examines the application of data mining methods to cardiac disease diagnosis in order to identify specific types of heart-related disease that are diagnosed using data mining techniques as well as the most successful data mining methods.

This study involved a systematic review of IEEE, Science Direct, Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus and MEDLINE databases from 2008 until April 2023. Inclusion criteria were original papers that used data mining methods for heart disease diagnosis. Non-English papers, those without full text, studies conducted on animals, and other types of papers (conference abstracts and letters) were excluded from the study. All the retrieved references were then assessed by title and abstract according to PRISMA, after which full texts of relevant articles were analyzed. The final sample comprised of 47 articles.

Various classification methods have been utilized to diagnose heart-related disease using different mining tools, with genetic neural network data mining method having the highest accuracy among the studied techniques. Results show that predicting cardiac disease is the most commonly performed task. The demographic, bio-clinical, personal and exercise-related attributes, as well as other features used for classification were identified. The findings suggest that data mining methods hold great potential for detecting and preventing heart disease on both individual and population scales.

The study findings have implications for the prevention and treatment of cardiac disease, especially in high-risk individuals. Data mining methods can be widely applied to detect and prevent heart disease on a population scale, as well as supporting decisions for the most suitable treatment for individual patients to prevent death and reduce treatment costs.