Worku Jimma, the first Ph.D. Graduate at School of Allied Medical Sciences, defended his Thesis titled “SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION FOR TREATMENT FAILURE RISK ESTIMATION AMONG PULMONARY TUBERCULOSIS PATIENTS IN ETHIOPIA”
Ethiopia is among the 22 high TB-burden countries. Nowadays, unsuccessful treatment of tuberculosis due to number of reasons is a challenge to the control of this disease. The main objective of this study was thus to determine the risk of treatment failure among TB cases that are under care of health system with diagnosed pulmonary TB in Southwest Ethiopia. Accordingly, data was collected from pulmonary TB patients’ record from three hospitals and ten health centers found in Southwest Ethiopia. SPSS, WEKA and MATLAB software were used for this study respectively for descriptive statistical analysis, data mining and fuzzy inference system development. Of the total of 3451 patients, treatment success and unsuccessful treatment was 2947 (85.4%) and 504 (14.6%) respectively. J48 decision tree model classified 2951 (85.51%) instances correctly and 500 (14.49%) instances incorrectly and the precision for treatment success was 0.855, F-measure was 0.922 and area under ROC (AUC) was 0.503. Evaluation of the test model was performed on 30% split and of the total 1035 instances, 901 (87.05 %) instances were classified correctly and 134 (12.95%) instances were classified incorrectly. Some of the rules used to build a Mamdani Fuzzy Inference System are: “If smear result after 5 months is positive, then there is high risk of unsuccessful treatment.”; “If there is previous TB history, then there is high risk of unsuccessful treatment.”; “If residence area is urban, then there is low risk of unsuccessful treatment.” Special emphasis should be paid to patients that are with high risk for unsuccessful treatment, especially if smear result after five months is positive. It is recommended that the existing TB control strategy of the country considers additional components suggested in this study.
Department of Health Information Managment
Supervisors: Dr. M. Ghazisaeedi, Dr. L. Shahmoradi
Advisors: Dr. M. K. Sharifi Yazdi, Dr. Sh. Rostam Niakan
External Reviewers: Dr. F. Asadi, Dr. R. Rabiei
Internal Reviewers: Dr. N. Eynollahi, Dr. M. Rahim Khani, Dr. M. Doraghi