A web-based high-performance multicriteria decision support system for medical diagnosis

Multicriteria decision making ~MCDM! methods can be powerful aids for evaluating patients’ medical information in medical diagnostic systems. Technique ordered preference by similarity to the ideal solution ~TOPSIS! is one of the more widely used MCDM methods in decision support systems. For the purpose of this work, the TOPSIS method is modified into a more suitable form and used for the implementation of a web-based medical diagnostic system. In our modified TOPSIS method, we have utilized fuzzy logic so that users can more accurately describe their symptoms. The data given to the modified TOPSIS method are often massive in proportions and may take a considerable amount of time to generate a ranking of alternatives. TOPSIS lends itself to parallel computation because it is virtually a combination of matrix computations. Therefore, computer parallelism is implemented so that a large amount of input data can be handled simultaneously, hence decreasing overall execution time. In addition, to make our MCDM system more accessible, we have designed our system to be web based. The web-based medical diagnosis system includes a dynamically generated web-based user interface, while the parallel implementation of the modified TOPSIS component, in conjunction with the Common Gateway Interface, forms the back end of the system. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.