A novel rule-based expert system for early diagnosis of bipolar and Major Depressive Disorder

Abstract

A confident and timely diagnosis of mental illnesses is one of the primary challenges practitioners repeatedly encounter when they start treating new patients. However, diagnosing can quickly become problematic as the subjects expose comparative symptoms among mental illnesses. Due to influencing a broad populace among mental ailments, an adjusted differentiation between Major Depressive Disorder, Mania Bipolar Disorder, Depressive Bipolar Disorder, and ordinary individuals with mild symptoms is one of the critical subjects for community health. This study responded to the described problem by proposing a novel rule-based Expert System, which evaluates the impact of disorder symptoms on the Certainty Factor concerning each mental status. The semantic rules are developed based on the recommendation of experts, and the implementation is carried out using Prolog and C# languages. Furthermore, an easy-to-use user interface is considered to facilitate the system workflow. The consistency of the developed framework is established by performing rigorous tests by expert psychiatrists as well as 120 clinical samples collected from private samples. Based on the results, the current model classifies mental disorder cases with a success rate of 93.33% using only the 17 symptoms specified in the ontology model. Furthermore, a questionnaire that measures user satisfaction after the test also achieves a mean score of 3.56 out of 4, which indicates a high degree of user acceptance. As a result, it is concluded that the current framework is a reliable tool for achieving a solid diagnosis in a shorter period.