Medical Opinions Analysis about the Decrease of Autopsies Using Emerging Pattern Mining

Abstract

An autopsy is a widely recognized procedure to guarantee ongoing enhancements in medicine. It finds extensive application in legal, scientific, medical, and research domains. However, declining autopsy rates in hospitals constitute a worldwide concern. For example, the Regional Hospital of Rio Blanco in Veracruz, Mexico, has substantially reduced the number of autopsies at hospitals in recent years. Since there are no documented historical records of a decrease in the frequency of autopsy cases, it is crucial to establish a methodological framework to substantiate any actual trends in the data. Emerging pattern mining (EPM) allows for finding differences between classes or data sets because it builds a descriptive data model concerning some given remarkable property. Data set description has become a significant application area in various contexts in recent years. In this research study, various EPM (emerging pattern mining) algorithms were used to extract emergent patterns from a data set collected based on medical experts’ perspectives on reducing hospital autopsies. Notably, the top-performing EPM algorithms were iEPMiner, LCMine, SJEP-C, Top-k minimal SJEPs, and Tree-based JEP-C. Among these, iEPMiner and LCMine demonstrated faster performance and produced superior emergent patterns when considering metrics such as Confidence, Weighted Relative Accuracy Criteria (WRACC), False Positive Rate (FPR), and True Positive Rate (TPR).