An application of machine learning in the diagnosis of ischaemic heart disease

Ishaemic heart disease is one of the world’s most important causes of mortality, so improvements and rationalization of diagnostic procedures would be very useful. The four diagnostic levels consist of evaluation of signs and symptoms of the disease and ECG (electrocardiogram) at rest, sequential ECG testing during the controlled exercise, myocardial scintigraphy and finally coronary angiography. The diagnostic process is stepwise and the results are interpreted hierarchically, i.e. the next step is necessary only if the results of the former are inconclusive. Because the suggestibility is possible, the results of each step are interpreted individually and only the results of the highest step are valid. On the other hand, Machine Learning methods may be able of objective interpretation of all available results for the same patient and in this way increase the diagnostic accuracy of each step. We conducted many experiments with four learning algorithms and different variations of our dataset (327 patients with completed diagnostic procedures). Our results show that improvements using Machine Learning techniques are reasonable and might find good use in practice.