On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 7:22 AM, Fred G <bayespoker...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello-- > I'm a pre-med student interested in decision-making as applied to medical > decisions. I am trying to build a medical decision-making algorithm and am > pretty stuck on a few things. > I've built a file that contains a list of many diseases and their associated > symptoms. For example, here are the column headers and two sample rows (the > "|" = "or"): > Disease Symptoms > Cold > sore_throat|runny_nose|congestion|cough|aches|slight_fever > Flu > sore_throat|fever|headache|muscle_aches|soreness|congestion|cough|returning_fever > My questions are the following: > a) How's the best way to make it so I can have a user type in a list of > symptoms and then have the computer tell the user the possible diseases that > share those symptoms? In other words, on a high-level I have a pretty good > idea of what I want my algorithm to do-- but I need help implementing the > basic version first. I'd like to do the following: >>>>Please enter a list of symptoms >>>>[user_input] >>>>Possible diseases include: x, y, z > b)Once I get that working, could anyone point me to good code already > written in Python such that I could have a model (for syntax and overall > structure) for figuring out how to make the computer evaluate more factors > such as: patient age, patient history, and even downloading archival data > for patients in the same demographic group? > Thanks! > >
One problem with writing the symptoms is misspelling and word choice, is mild fever the same as slight fever? etc. Another way to do that is to present a list, when the user selects one item in that list, (say, fever, mild) the list is restructured to exclude symptoms that would clash with that, like all the other fevers. After a while of clicking on list items, the evaluator can make a best match against diseases. Downside is a fair amount of processing. You could also group symptoms and have severity as a seperate, so you select fever, then mild,high, whatever. Evaluating it is going to be fun, it's a lot more than binary matches. -- http://neon-buddha.net _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
