Using reduced rule base with Expert System for the diagnosis of disease in hypertension

Hypertension, also called the "Silent Killer", is a dangerous and widespread disease that seriously threatens the health of individuals and communities worldwide, often leading to fatal outcomes such as heart attack, stroke, and renal failure. It affects approximately one billion people worldwide with increasing incidence. In Turkey, over 15 million people have hypertension. In this study, a new Medical Expert System (MES) procedure with reduced rule base was developed to determine hypertension. The aim was to determine the disease by taking all symptoms of hypertension into account in the Medical Expert System (7 symptoms, 27 = 128 different conditions). In this new MES procedure, instead of checking all the symptoms, the reduced rule bases were used. In order to get the reduced rule bases, the method of two-level simplification of Boolean functions was used. Through the use of this method, instead of assessing 27 = 128 individual conditions by taking 7 symptoms of hypertension into account, reduced cases were evaluated. The average rate of success was 97.6 % with the new MES procedure. © 2013 International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering.