Soft Computing in Medical Data Mining:A Survey

The successful application of data mining in highly visible fields like e-business, marketing and retail has led to its application in other industries and sectors like healthcare. The healthcare environment is still 'information rich' but 'knowledge poor'. There is a wealth of data available within the healthcare systems. Medical data mining has great potential for exploring the hidden patterns in the data sets of the medical domain. However, the available raw medical data are widely distributed, heterogeneous in nature, and voluminous. Soft computing tools, individually or in integrated manner, are turning out to be strong candidates for performing data mining tasks efficiently. This paper intends to provide a survey of current data mining techniques using soft computing that are in use in today's medical research. We identify a few areas of healthcare where these techniques are applied and find out the advances and the state-of-the-art in the area of Data Mining with Soft Computing Methodologies.