Application of pattern recognition tools for classifying acute coronary syndrome: an integrated medical modeling

OBJECTIVE: The classification of Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS), using artificial intelligence (AI), has recently drawn the attention of the medical researchers. Using this approach, patients with myocardial infarction can be differentiated from those with unstable angina. The present study aims to develop an integrated model, based on the feature selection and classification, for the automatic classification of ACS.

METHODS: A dataset containing medical records of 809 patients suspected to suffer from ACS was used. For each subject, 266 clinical factors were collected. At first, a feature selection was performed based on interviews with 20 cardiologists; thereby 40 seminal features for classifying ACS were selected. Next, a feature selection algorithm was also applied to detect a subset of the features with the best classification accuracy. As a result, the feature numbers considerably reduced to only seven. Lastly, based on the seven selected features, eight various common pattern recognition tools for classification of ACS were used.

RESULTS: The performance of the aforementioned classifiers was compared based on their accuracy computed from their confusion matrices. Among these methods, the multi-layer perceptron showed the best performance with the 83.2% accuracy.

CONCLUSION: The results reveal that an integrated AI-based feature selection and classification approach is an effective method for the early and accurate classification of ACS and ultimately a timely diagnosis and treatment of this disease.