A user-friendly AI-based clinical decision support system for rapid detection of pandemic diseases: Covid-19 and Monkeypox

Abstract

Accurate and rapid diagnosis is a significant factor in reducing incidence rate; especially when the number of people inflicted with a disease is considerably high. In the healthcare sector, the decision-making process might be a complex and error-prone one due to excessive workload, negligence, time restrictions, incorrect or incomplete evaluation of medical reports and analyses, and lack of experience as well as insufficient knowledge and skills. Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) are those developed to improve effectiveness of decisions by supporting physicians’ decision-making process regarding their patients. In this study, a new artificial intelligence-based CDSS and a user-friendly interface for this system were developed to ensure rapid and accurate detection of pandemic diseases. The proposed CDSS, which is called panCdss, uses hybrid models consisting of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model and Machine Learning (ML) methods in order to detect covid-19 from lung computed tomography (CT) images. Transfer Learning (TL) models were used to detect monkeypox from skin lesion images and covid-19 from chest X-Ray images. The results obtained from these models were evaluated according to accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score performance metrics. Of these models, the ones with the highest classification performance were used in the panCdss. The highest classification values obtained for each dataset were as follows: % 91.71 accuracy, % 92.07 precision, % 90.29 recall and % 91.71 F1-score for covid-19 CT dataset by using CNN+RF hybrid model; % 99.56 accuracy, % 100 precision, % 99.12 recall and % 99.55 F1-score for covid-19 X-ray dataset by using VGG16 model; and % 90.38 accuracy, % 93.32 precision, % 88.11 recall and % 90.64 F1-score for monkeypox dataset by using MobileNetV2. It is believed that panCdss can be successfully employed for rapid and accurate classification of pandemic diseases and can help reduce physicians’ workload. Furthermore, the study showed that the proposed CDSS is an adaptable, flexible and dynamic system that can be practiced not only for the detection of pandemic diseases but also for other diseases. To the authors’ knowledge, this proposed CDSS is the first CDSS developed for pandemic disease detection.