A diagnostic model for cirrhosis in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease: an artificial neural network approach

Background: Timely diagnosis of liver cirrhosis is vital for preventing further liver damage and giving the patient the chance of transplantation. Although biopsy of the liver is the gold standard for cirrhosis assessment, it has some risks and limitations and this has led to the development of new noninvasive methods to determine the stage and prognosis of the patients. We aimed to design an artificial neural network (ANN) model to diagnose cirrhosis patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) using routine laboratory data. Methods: Data were collected from 392 patients with NAFLD by the Middle East Research Center in Tehran. Demographic variables, history of diabetes, INR, complete blood count, albumin, ALT, AST and other routine laboratory tests, examinations and medical history were gathered. Relevant variables were selected by means of feature extraction algorithm (Knime software) and were accredited by the experts. A neural network was developed using the MATLAB software. Results: The best obtained model was developed with two layers, eight neurons and TANSIG and PURLIN functions for layer one and output layer, respectively. The sensitivity and specificity of the model were 86.6% and 92.7%, respectively. Conclusion: The results of this study revealed that the neural network modeling may be able to provide a simple, noninvasive and accurate method for diagnosing cirrhosis only based on routine laboratory data.