A hybrid intelligent system for medical diagnosis

We propose a novel hybrid intelligent system (HIS) that is a combination of numerical and linguistic knowledge representation. The proposed HIS is a hierarchical integration of an incremental learning fuzzy neural network (ILFN) and a fuzzy linguistic model optimized via the genetic algorithm. The ILFN is self-organizing network with the capability of fast, online, incremental learning. The linguistic model is constructed based on knowledge embedded in the trained ILFN. The knowledge captured from the low-level ILFN can be mapped to the higher-level linguistic model and vice versa. The GA is applied to optimize the linguistic model to maintain high accuracy and comprehensibility. The resulted HIS is capable of dealing with low-level numerical computation and higher-level linguistic computation. After the system completely constructed, it can incrementally learn new information in both numerical and linguistic structures. To evaluate the system's performance the well-known benchmark Wisconsin breast cancer data was studied as an application to medical diagnosis. The simulation results show that the proposed HIS perform better than the individual standalone systems.