Rough Based Granular Computing Approach for Making Treatment Decisions of Hepatitis C Farid A. Badria #1 Mohammed M.Eissa *2 Mohammed Elmogy #2 Mohammed Hashem #3 faridbadria@gmail.com mohammed.mamdouh@gmail.com melmogy@mans.edu.eg mhashem100@yahoo.com Pharmacognosy Department, Faculty of Pharmacy, Mansoura University 1 Information Systems Department, Faculty of Computers and Information, Mansoura University 2 Information Systems Department, Computer and Information Sciences, AinShams University 3 Mansoura 35516, Egypt Abstract— Hepatitis C virus is a massive health issue affecting significant portions of the world’s population. Applying data pre-processing, feature reduction techniques and generating rules based on the selected features for classification tasks are considered as important steps in the knowledge discovery area in databases. Medical experts analyze the generated rules to find out the most significant rules to apply in order to classify unseen real life cases. This paper highlights a rough set as a powerful analysis tool based on granular computing framework to identify the most relevant attributes, generate a set of reducts which consist of a minimal set of attributes and induce a set of rules for classifying studied cases for testing new drugs for HCV treatment . The experimental results obtained, show that the overall classification accuracy offered by the proposed approach is highly based on generated rules during Hepatitis C treatment. I. INTRODUCTION Medical informatics is the field that deals with the cognitive, information processing, and communication tasks of medical practice, education, and research, including information science and technology to support these tasks. It is an intrinsically interdisciplinary field, with a highly applied focus, but it also addresses a number of fundamental research problems in addition to planning and policy issues. It deals with the resources, devices, and methods required optimizing the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of in-formation in health and biomedicine fields. Medical informatics tools include not only computers but also clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems. It is applied to the areas of nursing clinical care, dentistry, pharmacy, public health and (bio) medical research. The greater the amount of data collected, the more difficult it becomes for doctors to use the tools to analyse their own data. The tools should be applied to user-focused medical researchers to be able to analyse their own data. For example, Booth et al. [1] who discovered the differences in the temporal patterns of hepatitis B (HBV) and C (HCV). The differences between hepatitis have not been clearly defined, and more importantly, examining whether the methods applied can work well and be applied to other fields or not. Hepatitis means “inflammation of the liver”. Hepatitis C is a liver disease caused by the hepatitis C virus (HCV) .It sometimes results an acute illness, but most often becomes a silent, chronic infection that can lead to cirrhosis (scarring), liver failure, liver cancer, and death. Generally hepatitis C can only be transmitted via infected blood. An infection is therefore possible whenever someone has come into contact with blood, dried blood or with medicines prepared from blood. There is no vaccine for hepatitis C. HCV infection is found worldwide. Countries with high rates of chronic infection are Egypt (22%), Pakistan (4.8%) and China (3.2%). These countries promote unsafe injections using contaminated equipment [2]. The World Health organization (WHO) estimates that 170 million people, i.e. 3% of the world’s population, are currently infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) [3]. After hepatitis C virus enters the body, it penetrates the liver cells, where it proliferates rapidly and begins to damage the cells. Our bodies contain a defence system called the immune system. It tries to combat the virus by destroying the affected liver cells. In most cases the virus becomes established in the body and cannot be cured without drugs. If hepatitis C virus is still detectable six months after the infection, the acute infection develops into a chronic infection. Patients suffering from chronic hepatitis C are at an increased risk of cirrhosis – massive damage - of the liver. Once the liver is damaged, its function gradually decreases. This condition can result liver failure and death. Once cirrhos is developed, the risk of liver cancer is also dramatically increased [4] the current treatment for HCV, according to the United Kingdom’s clinical guidelines, combines two drugs: Interferon-alpha and Ribavirin [5-7]a chief factor in prescribing combined drugs therapy is that both drugs generate side effects in most individuals. The cost of combined drugs therapy is between £3000 and £12, 000 per patient per year. A common belief states that treating patients using expensive drugs is usually associated with potentially ICCTA 2013, 29-31 October 2013, Alexandria, Egypt 978-1-4799-2416-5/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE 133