New Method to Assist Discrimination of Liver Diseases by Spherical SOM with Mahalanobis Distance

Spherical SOM, an improved version of a kind of neutral network SOM, has successfully been applied to data analysis in a variety of fields achieving effective results. However, distance measure of commercial spherical SOM is limited to the Euclidean distance and it is not suitable enough to the analysis of biased data such as blood test results. The Mahalanobis distance is said to be effective for the analysis of such medical data. Therefore it is expected that better results should be obtained if spherical SOM with Mahalanobis distance is applied to the analysis of medical data. In this paper, we take blood test items as multi-dimensional vectors and convert the input data into Mahalanobis distance with the aim of developing an automated diagnosis system by spherical SOM with Mahalanobis distance as pseudo input data. Conversion of the input data into Mahalanobis distance ensures correct evaluations of the biased data of blood test results at the same time allowing automated diagnosis based on doctors’ intuitions and experiences. We have grouped subjects of diagnosis whose features were not well discriminated by conventional Mahalanobis distance and have administered detailed discrimination by the group and obtained better discrimination rates. While in the conventional studies TP rates for the following five categories, no liverrelated problem, hepatoma (liver cancer), acute hepatitis, chronic hepatitis and liver cirrhosis, were 100%, 70%, 100%, 80% and 60% respectively, they were 96%, 80%, 71%, 86% and 91% respectively with the proposed method. Significant results were obtained overall except for acute hepatitis.