Multi-period medical diagnosis method using a single valued neutrosophic similarity measure based on tangent function

Because of the increased volume of information available to physicians from advanced medical technology, the obtained information of each symptom with respect to a disease may contain truth, falsity and indeterminacy information. Since a single-valued neutrosophic set (SVNS) consists of the three terms like the truth-membership, indeterminacy-membership and falsity-membership functions, it is very suitable for representing indeterminate and inconsistent information. Then, similarity measure plays an important role in pattern recognition and medical diagnosis. However, existing medical diagnosis methods can only handle the single period medical diagnosis problem, but cannot deal with the multi-period medical diagnosis problems with neutrosophic information. Hence, the purpose of this paper was to propose similarity measures between SVNSs based on tangent function and a multi-period medical diagnosis method based on the similarity measure and the weighted aggregation of multi-period information to solve multi-period medical diagnosis problems with single-valued neutrosophic information. Then, we compared the tangent similarity measures of SVNSs with existing similarity measures of SVNSs by a numerical example about pattern recognitions to indicate the effectiveness and rationality of the proposed similarity measures. In the multi-period medical diagnosis method, we can find a proper diagnosis for a patient by the proposed similarity measure between the symptoms and the considered diseases represented by SVNSs and the weighted aggregation of multi-period information. Then, a multi-period medical diagnosis example was presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed diagnosis method and to indicate the effectiveness of the proposed diagnosis method by the comparative analysis. The diagnosis results showed that the developed multi-period medical diagnosis method can help doctors make a proper diagnosis by the comprehensive information of multi-periods. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.