Fuzzy Obesity Index for obesity treatment and surgical indication

Abstract:  Abstract A Fuzzy Obesity Index for being used as an alternative in obesity treatment and bariatric surgery indication (BSI) is presented in this paper. Obesity is nowadays understood as universal epidemy and became an important source of death and co-morbidities. The search for a more accurate method to evaluate obesity and to indicate a better treatment is important in the world health context. In this paper the Body Mass Index (BMI) is first modified and treated as fuzzy sets. BMI is characterized by its capacity of weight excess and considered the main criteria for obesity treatment and BSI. Nevertheless, the fat excess related to the Body Fat (BF) is actually the principal harmful factor in obesity disease, that is usually neglected. Due to that this paper also presents a new fuzzy mechanism for evaluating obesity by associating BMI with Body Fat (BF) that yields a fuzzy obesity index for obesity evaluation and treatment and allows to build up a Fuzzy Decision Support System (FDSS) for BSI. Different values of BMI and BF (in terms of %BF) used for validating the proposed method classify individuals in distinct categories with degrees of compatibility more realistic than those accomplished by Boolean classification, as usually occur. The proposed method may assume an important whole in medicine as an index for obesity evaluation and surgery treatment by using the advantages of BMI and BF in synergy.