Automated differential diagnosis method for iron deficiency anemia and beta thalassemia trait based on iterative Chi2 feature selector

Abstract

Introduction The differential diagnosis of anemia is an important issue for hematology laboratories. We aimed at investigating the performance of a powerful computer-based model to aid diagnosis. Materials and methods Our work presents a new feature selection-based automated disease diagnosis model. To create a testbed, a new corpus is collected retrospectively. Our data sets contain beta thalassemia trait, iron deficiency anemia, and healthy groups. Our presented automated ailment classification model consists iterative chi2 (IChi2) feature selection and classification phases. The used data set includes 25 features, and IChi2 selects the 20 most valuable of them. These are forwarded to 24 traditional classifiers. Results In this work, two data sets have been used to test our proposal. In the classification phase of this model, 24 shallow classifiers have been used and the best accurate classifiers are Medium Gaussian Support Vector Machine (MGSVM) and Coarse Tree (CT) for the first and second data sets, respectively. These classifiers have been attained 97.48% and 99.73% classification accuracies using the first and second data sets, consecutively. These results are calculated using 10-fold cross-validation. Moreover, hold-out validation has been used in this work, and the results are given in the experiments. Conclusion Our results denoted the success of IChi2-based classification model for diagnosis on the laboratory data set. We have found a new and robust model to differentiate iron deficiency anemia and beta thalassemia trait. This model may be beneficial for rational laboratory use.