Analysis of Berg Balance Scale in hip fracture patients using fuzzy clustering

Hip fractures are most frequent cause of hospitalization after the fall in older population and consequently have been subject of great interest in medicine and biomedical engineering. It has been observed that the incidence of hip fractures is rising at the approximate rate of 1-3% per year, with subsequent mortality rates at approximately 33% in first year after the fracture. In this paper we propose to classify patients at the time of admission into several clusters with respect to their ability for successful recovery. To this purpose we first evaluate the efficacy of rehabilitation program based on the balance function improvement measured by Berg Balance Scale (BBS) in elderly (in the remainder of the paper defined as above 65 years of life) after hip fractures, and evaluate influence of gender, age and comorbidity on balance function improvement in these patients. Then we design clustering procedure in which the patients are clustered according to BBS improvement using statistically most significant parameters. We then evaluate the proposed clustering procedure on a data sample consisting of 203 patients that have been admitted to the Institute for Rehabilitation, Belgrade, Serbia.