title: An intelligent system based on fuzzy probabilities for medical diagnosis- a study in aphasia diagnosis.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Aphasia diagnosis is particularly challenging due to the linguistic uncertainty and vagueness, inconsistencies in the definition of aphasic syndromes, large number of measurements with imprecision, natural diversity and subjectivity in test objects as well as in opinions of experts who diagnose the disease.
  
  
  METHODS
  Fuzzy probability is proposed here as the basic framework for handling the uncertainties in medical diagnosis and particularly aphasia diagnosis. To efficiently construct this fuzzy probabilistic mapping, statistical analysis is performed that constructs input membership functions as well as determines an effective set of input features.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Considering the high sensitivity of performance measures to different distribution of testing/training sets, a statistical t-test of significance is applied to compare fuzzy approach results with NN results as well as author's earlier work using fuzzy logic. The proposed fuzzy probability estimator approach clearly provides better diagnosis for both classes of data sets. Specifically, for the first and second type of fuzzy probability classifiers, i.e. spontaneous speech and comprehensive model, P-values are 2.24E-08 and 0.0059, respectively, strongly rejecting the null hypothesis.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  THE TECHNIQUE IS APPLIED AND COMPARED ON BOTH COMPREHENSIVE AND SPONTANEOUS SPEECH TEST DATA FOR DIAGNOSIS OF FOUR APHASIA TYPES: Anomic, Broca, Global and Wernicke. Statistical analysis confirms that the proposed approach can significantly improve accuracy using fewer Aphasia features.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran.
authors.forename: Majid
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Moshtagh-Khorasani
authors.forename: Mohammad-R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Akbarzadeh-T
authors.forename: Nader
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Jahangiri
authors.forename: Mehdi
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Khoobdel