ANN Prediction of Metabolic Syndrome: a Complex Puzzle that will be Completed

The diagnosis of metabolic syndrome (MetS) has a leading role in the early prevention of chronic disease, such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancers and chronic kidney disease. It would be very greatful that MetS diagnosis can be predicted in everyday clinical practice. This paper presents artificial neural network (ANN) prediction of the diagnosis of MetS that includes solely non-invasive, low-cost and easily-obtained diagnostic methods. This solution can extract the risky persons and suggests complete tests only on them by saving money and time. ANN input vectors are very simple and contain solely non-invasive, low-cost and easily-obtained parameters: gender, age, body mass index, waist-to-height ratio, systolic and diastolic blood pressures. ANN output is MetS-coefficient in true/false form, obtained from MetS definition of International Diabetes Federation (IDF). ANN training, validation and testing are conducted on the large dataset that includes 2928 persons. Feed-forward ANNs with 1-100 hidden neurons were considered and an optimal architecture were determinated. Comparison with other authors leads to the conclusion that our solution achieves the highest positive predictive value PPV = 0.8579. Further, obtained negative predictive value NPV = 0.8319 is also high and close to PPV, which means that our ANN solution is suitable both for positive and negative MetS prediction.