Método computacional para auxiliar o diagnóstico precoce da Granulomatose de Wegener

Abstract

This paper presents a proteomic pattern recognition system aimed at assisting in the early diagnosis of Wegener's Granulomatosis (WG), a rare idiopathic vasculitis that is difficult to detect and carries a high mortality rate for untreated individuals. The proposed method involves extracting features from proteomic signals and classifying them as belonging to individuals with or without WG. To achieve this, Independent Component Analysis is used for feature extraction, the Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance algorithm is employed to reduce the number of features and computational costs, and a Support Vector Machine is used for classification. The method's performance was evaluated using a dataset of 335 proteomic signals, comprising 75 active cases, 101 negative cases, and 159 cases in remission. The best result was obtained using a twenty-feature vector, yielding accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity of 98.24%, 99.73%, and 99.50%, respectively. These results demonstrate that the proposed system is efficient for diagnosing WG and outperforms the current methodology, which is based on clinical, serological, and radiological examinations proposed by the American College of Rheumatology.