title: A medical cost estimation with fuzzy neural network of acute hepatitis patients in emergency room.
abstract: Taiwan is an area where chronic hepatitis is endemic. Liver cancer is so common that it has been ranked first among cancer mortality rates since the early 1980s in Taiwan. Besides, liver cirrhosis and chronic liver diseases are the sixth or seventh in the causes of death. Therefore, as shown by the active research on hepatitis, it is not only a health threat, but also a huge medical cost for the government. The estimated total number of hepatitis B carriers in the general population aged more than 20 years old is 3,067,307. Thus, a case record review was conducted from all patients with diagnosis of acute hepatitis admitted to the Emergency Department (ED) of a well-known teaching-oriented hospital in Taipei. The cost of medical resource utilization is defined as the total medical fee. In this study, a fuzzy neural network is employed to develop the cost forecasting model. A total of 110 patients met the inclusion criteria. The computational results indicate that the FNN model can provide more accurate forecasts than the support vector regression (SVR) or artificial neural network (ANN). In addition, unlike SVR and ANN, FNN can also provide fuzzy IF-THEN rules for interpretation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Industrial Management, National Taiwan University of Science, Technology, Taipei, Taiwan. Electronic address: rjkuo@mail.ntust.edu.tw.
authors.forename: R J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Kuo
authors.affiliation: Department of Industrial Management, National Taiwan University of Science, Technology, Taipei, Taiwan. Electronic address: jwz.cheng@gmail.com.
authors.forename: W C
authors.initials: WC
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.affiliation: Department of Emergency Medicine, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; National Taiwan University Hospital, Hsin-Chu Branch, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan. Electronic address: dtermer17@yahoo.com.tw.
authors.forename: W C
authors.initials: WC
authors.lastname: Lien
authors.affiliation: Department of Emergency Medicine, Sijhih Cathay General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan. Electronic address: yangteckjin@hotmail.com.
authors.forename: T J
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Yang
mesh_terms: D000208:Acute Disease; D004636:Emergency Service, Hospital; D017143:Fuzzy Logic; D017048:Health Care Costs; D006525:Hepatitis, Viral, Human / Q000191:economics* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000628:therapy; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D013624:Taiwan / Q000453:epidemiology
keywords: Acute hepatitis; Fuzzy neural network; Medical resource estimation