Towards an automated approach for health status evaluation of patients with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis

Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) is a chronic inflammatory rheumatic disease that leads to disabled children with deformed joints and chronic pains. Since, the use of the traditional scores that evaluate quality of life of JIA patients are time consuming and usually not either accurate nor easy to apply, there is a great need to generate a new, easy and effective way to evaluate the health status scores autonomously. In this study, an automated approach is proposed for modelling the relationship between health status of patients with JIA and a number of influencing factors using Neuro-fuzzy algorithms. The approach was applied on data collected from 128 patients with JIA. The proposed model was verified using statistical analysis. Further, results obtained from the Neuro-fuzzy system were found very promising.