Artificial Neural Network Models for Coronary Artery Disease

Background: Coronary artery disease (CAD) is an important cause of mortality and morbidity globally. Objective : The early prediction of the CAD would be valuable in identifying individuals at risk, and in focusing resources on its prevention. In this paper, we aimed to establish a diagnostic model to predict CAD by using three approaches of ANN (pattern recognition-ANN, LVQ-ANN, and competitive ANN). Methods: One promising method for early prediction of disease based on risk factors is machine learning. Among different machine learning algorithms, the artificial neural network (ANN) algorithms have been applied widely in medicine and a variety of real-world classifications. ANN is a non-linear computational model that is inspired by the human brain to analyze and process complex datasets. Results: Different methods of ANN that are investigated in this paper indicate in both pattern recognition ANN and LVQ-ANN methods, the predictions of Angiography+ class have high accuracy. Moreover, in CNN, the correlations between the individuals in cluster ”c” with the class of Angiography+ are strongly high. This accuracy indicates the significant difference among some of the input features in Angiography+ class and the other two output classes. A comparison among the chosen weights in these three methods in separating control class and Angiography+ shows that hs-CRP, FSG, and WBC are the most substantial excitatory weights in recognizing the Angiography+ individuals although, HDL-C and MCH are determined as inhibitory weights. Furthermore, the effect of decomposition of a multi-class problem to a set of binary classes and random sampling on the accuracy of the diagnostic model is investigated. Conclusion: This study confirms that pattern recognition-ANN had the most accuracy of performance among different methods of ANN. This is due to the back-propagation procedure in which the network classifies input variables based on labeled classes. The results of binarization show that decomposition of the multi-class set to binary sets could achieve higher accuracy.