Machine Learning to Predict Medical Devices Repair and Maintenance Needs

Abstract

Products often experience different failure and repair needs during their lifespan. Prediction of the type of failure is crucial to the maintenance team for various reasons, such as realizing the device performance, creating standard strategies for repair, and analyzing the trade-off between cost and profit of repair. This study aims to apply machine learning tools to forecast failure types of medical devices and help the maintenance team properly decides on repair strategies based on a limited dataset. Two types of medical devices are used as the case study. The main challenge resides in using the limited attributes of the dataset to forecast product failure type. First, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) algorithm is used as a regression model to forecast three attributes, including the time of next failure, repair time, and repair time z-scores. Then, eight classification models, including Naïve Bayes with Bernoulli (NB-Bernoulli), Gaussian (NB-Gaussian), Multinomial (NB-Multinomial) model, Support Vector Machine with linear (SVM-Linear), polynomial (SVM-Poly), sigmoid (SVM-Sigmoid), and radical basis (SVM-RBF) function, and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) are used to forecast the failure type. Finally, Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is used to identify maintenance conditions for each product. The results reveal that the classification models could forecast failure type with similar performance, although the attributes of the dataset were limited.