[Tutor] Medical Decision-Making Question

[James Reynolds]

I would start by getting a lot of the parameters you need in a database such
as SQLite (comes with python).

So for example, you would have a disease with known symptoms. You could
structure your tables with diseases symptoms

So, say the disease is a cold in the table you will have a row for cold and
columns identifying each symptom (by unique IDs).

In your symptom table you would have a row for each symptom and a column for
its parameters and probabilities and such.  For example, gender exclusive,
age exclusive, geographic exclusive, workplace, etc.

>From there you can build your select statements on the fly using python's
string formating.

That's how i would do it anyway.

I'm sure there are other ways as well.

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 10:22 AM, Fred G <bayespokerguy at 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!
>
>
>
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