A Novel Method for Disease Recognition and Cure Time Prediction Based on Symptoms

Healthcare is a sector where decisions usually have very high-risk and high-cost associated with them. One bad choice can cost a person's life. With diseases like Swine Flu on the rise, which have symptoms quite similar to common cold, it's very difficult for people to differentiate between medical conditions. We propose a novel method for recognition of diseases and prediction of their cure time based on the symptoms. We do this by assigning different coefficients to each symptom of a disease, and filtering the dataset with the severity score assigned to each symptom by the user. The diseases are identified based on a numerical value calculated in the fashion mentioned above. For predicting the cure time of a disease, we use reinforcement learning. Our algorithm takes into account the similarity between the condition of the current user and other users who have suffered from the same disease, and uses the similarity scores as weights in prediction of cure time. We also predict the current medical condition of user relative to people who have suffered from same disease.