A novel machine learning program applied to discover otological diagnoses

A novel machine learning system, Galactica, has been developed for knowledge discovery from databases. This system was applied to discover diagnostic rules from a patient database containing 564 cases with vestibular schwannoma, bening paroxysmal positional vertigo, Me´nie`re's disease, sudden deafness, traumatic vertigo and vestibular neuritis diagnoses. The rules were evaluated using an independent testing set. The accuracy of rules for these diagnoses were 91%, 96%, 81%, 95%, 92% and 98%, respectively. Besides being accurate, the rules contained the five most important diagnostic questions identified in the earlier research. The knowledge presented with rules can be easily comprehended and verified.