A decision support system based on support vector machine for diagnosis of periodontal disease

OBJECTIVE: Early diagnosis of many diseases is essential for their treatment. Furthermore, the existence of abundant and unknown variables makes more complicated decision making. For this reason, the diagnosis and classification of diseases using machine learning algorithms have attracted a lot of attention. Therefore, this study aimed to design a support vector machine (SVM) based decision-making support system to diagnosis various periodontal diseases. Data were collected from 300 patients referring to Periodontics department of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences, west of Iran. Among these patients, 160 were Gingivitis, 60 were localized periodontitis and 80 were generalized periodontitis. In the designed classification model, 11 variables such as age, sex, smoking, gingival index, plaque index and so on used as input and output variable show the individual’s status as a periodontal disease. RESULTS: Using different kernel functions in the design of the SVM classification model showed that the radial kernel function with an overall correct classification accuracy of 88.7% and the overall hypervolume under the manifold (HUM) value was to 0.912 has the best performance. The results of the present study show that the designed classification model has an acceptable performance in predicting periodontitis.