Distinguishing Multiple Concurrent Esophageal Motility Disorders Using High-resolution Manometry

Esophageal mobility disorders are a type of digestive system problem characterized by abnormal bolus movement in the esophagus. The standard diagnostic method for these kinds of disorders is High-Resolution Manometry (HRM). Despite the availability of guidelines like “Chicago” for the analysis of HRM results, diagnosis is still a challenging task that relies on the physician's skills or requires additional assessment modalities. Additionally, it is typical for esophageal mobility disorders to co-occur in one person, leading to a more complex situation for problem identification.The current study focuses on cases who suffering from more than one disorder simultaneously. Then the problem of disorder identification can be interpreted as a multi-label classification problem. Consequently, the fuzzy classifier architecture that was previously introduced for automatic single-disorder diagnosis by the authors is modified. The presented classifier in this paper not only learns the input space from the samples but also utilizes the co-morbidity of disorders to enhance the prediction results. The outcomes show that adding this information to the learning procedure of the base classifier enhances its performance and generates a new fuzzy classifier that overcomes other multi-label classifiers. The presented method is able to differentiate esophageal mobility disorders with an average Hamming loss of 0.18 ± 0.08 which is better than other competitor methods.