Providing initial observations is crucial for the /diagnosis
to return best possible results. There are different ways of gathering the initial evidence from a user,
with the /search and /parse
endpoints being the most useful. The /suggest endpoint
aims to further enhance this process in interactive applications by encouraging users to provide additional health information.
Every evidence gathered by way of /suggest should be marked with
"source": "suggest", e.g.
{
...
"evidence": [
{"id": "s_21", "choice_id": "present", "source": "suggest"},
{"id": "s_13", "choice_id": "absent", "source": "suggest"},
{"id": "s_102", "choice_id": "absent", "source": "suggest"}
]
}/suggest endpoint has 3 modes, each described in detail in the following subsections.
{"suggest_method": "symptoms"} is a default mode. It returns symptoms that have
frequently been reported by other users with similar symptoms, age, and sex. Suggestions from this mode may help
a patient in expressing their chief complaint more precisely.
{"suggest_method": "risk_factors"} returns risk factors which are the most appropriate
to ask given patient’s age and sex. This mode allows for empty evidence,
i.e. "age" : {"value": 25}, "sex" : "female", "evidence" : [] is a valid request body.
{"suggest_method": "red_flags"} returns alarming symptoms - a list of observations
related to patient’s evidence that may be associated with potentially life-threatening conditions.
This mode is an equivalent of /red_flags.
After a user of your application selects some symptoms with /search
or /parse, you can use /suggest
to generate suggestions of other symptoms that might be present (think of a recommendation system such as "Other users with your symptoms also reported..."). The /suggest
endpoint can also be used without sending any selected symptoms, to generate a list of the most commonly reported symptoms. This can be useful before or instead of /search
in some scenarios.
Please note, however, that /suggest
shouldn't be used as a replacement for /diagnosis. The /suggest
endpoint cannot perform differential diagnosis and uses a different statistical engine. After you've gathered 3-6 initial symptoms, you're safe to start making calls to /diagnosis.
The /suggest
endpoint is available in all languages, but can only work with the Infermedica default model.
The /suggest
endpoint responds to POST requests of the same structure as /diagnosis:
curl "https://api.infermedica.com/v3/suggest" \
-X "POST" \
-H "App-Id: XXXXXXXX" -H "App-Key: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
"age" : {
"value": 25
},
"sex" : "female",
"evidence" : [
{
"choice_id" : "present",
"id" : "s_305",
"source": "initial"
}
],
"suggest_method": "symptoms"
}'The example above describes the case of a 25-year-old female patient who has already reported vomiting (represented here by the symptom ID s_305).
The response contains a list of symptoms that have often been reported together with the provided observations by other patients
of the same sex and similar age. Each returned symptom is represented by a JSON object with the following attributes:
id, name
and name_common. These values are consistent with the database of
medical concepts
understood by the Infermedica API.
[
{
"id": "s_156",
"name": "Nausea",
"common_name": "Feeling sick"
},
{
"id": "s_13",
"name": "Abdominal pain",
"common_name": "Stomach pain"
},
{
"id": "s_8",
"name": "Diarrhea",
"common_name": "Diarrhea"
}
]Please note that the free trial plan of the Infermedica API allows for only a limited number of calls to the /suggest
endpoint. Please contact us for other plan options.