Computer-aided therapeutic diagnosis for anorexia.

Journal: Biomedical engineering online
Published Date:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Anorexia nervosa is a clinical disorder syndrome of the wide spectrum without a fully recognized etiology. The necessary issue in the clinical diagnostic process is to detect the causes of this disease (e.g., my body image, food, family, peers), which the therapist gradually comes to by verifying assumptions using proper methods and tools for diagnostic process. When a person is diagnosed with anorexia, a clinician (a doctor, a therapist or a psychologist) proposes a therapeutic diagnosis and considers the kind of treatment that should be applied. This process is also continued during therapeutic diagnosis. In both cases, it is recommended to apply computer-aided tools designed for testing and confirming the assumptions made by a psychologist. The paper aims to present the computer-aided therapeutic diagnosis method for anorexia. The proposed method consists of 4 stages: free statements of a patient about his/her body image, the general sentiment analysis of statement based on Recurrent Neural Network, assessment of the intensity of five basic emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, fear and disgust (using the Nencki Affective Word List and conversion of words to their basic form), and the assessment of particular areas of difficulties-the sentiment analysis based on the dictionary approach was applied.

Authors

  • Dominik Spinczyk
    Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Silesian University of Technology, 40 Roosevelta, 41-800, Zabrze, Poland. dspinczyk@polsl.pl.
  • Mateusz Bas
    Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Silesian University of Technology, 40 Roosevelta, 41-800, Zabrze, Poland.
  • Mariusz Dzieciątko
    SAS Institute Sp. z o.o, Gdańska 27/31, 01-633, Warsaw, Poland.
  • Michał Maćkowski
    Faculty of Automatic Control, Electronic and Computer Science, Silesian University of Technology, 16 Akademicka, 44-100, Gliwice, Poland.
  • Katarzyna Rojewska
    Faculty of Pedagogy and Psychology, University of Silesia in Katowice, 53 Grażyńskiego, 40-126, Katowice, Poland.
  • Stella Maćkowska
    Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Silesian University of Technology, 40 Roosevelta, 41-800, Zabrze, Poland.