Neural network-based method to stratify people at risk for developing diabetic foot: A support system for health professionals

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is a chronic disease with a high worldwide prevalence. Diabetic foot is one of the DM complications and compromises health and quality of life, due to the risk of lower limb amputation. This work aimed to build a risk classification system for the evolution of diabetic foot, using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). METHODS: This methodological study used two databases, one for system design (training and validation) containing 250 participants with DM and another for testing, containing 141 participants. Each subject answered a questionnaire with 54 questions about foot care and sociodemographic information. Participants from both databases were classified by specialists as high or low risk for diabetic foot. Supervised ANN (multi-layer Perceptron—MLP) models were exploited and a smartphone app was built. The app returns a personalized report indicating self-care for each user. The System Usability Scale (SUS) was used for the usability evaluation. RESULTS: MLP models were built and, based on the principle of parsimony, the simplest model was chosen to be implemented in the application. The model achieved accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value of 85%, 76%, 91%, 89%, and 79%, respectively, for the test data. The app presented good usability (93.33 points on a scale from 0 to 100). CONCLUSIONS: The study showed that the proposed model has satisfactory performance and is simple, considering that it requires only 10 variables. This simplicity facilitates its use by health professionals and patients with diabetes.