The Development of Symbolic Expressions for the Detection of Hepatitis C Patients and the Disease Progression from Blood Parameters Using Genetic Programming-Symbolic Classification Algorithm  
[PERSON]  
1 Faculty of Engineering, University of R viruses that can cause hepatitis i.e., cytomegalovirusovirus, Epstein-Barr virus, and yellow fever virus. The other causes of hepatitis, besides viruses, include heavy alcohol use, medications, toxins, autoimmune diseases, etc. The spread of hepatoviruses is different for different types. Hepatitis A and E are spread by contaminated food and water. Hepatitis B is sexually transmitted or passed during pregnancy or childbirth from mother to child. Hepatitis C is spread through infected blood (needle sharing by intravenous drug users) while hepatitis D can only infect people with hepatitis B.  
HCV belongs to the genus of the Flaviviridae family called Hepactivirus. The virus particle consists of a lipid membrane envelope that is 55-65 [nm] in diameter. The glycoproteins E1 and E2 which take part in viral attachment and cell intrusion are attached to the envelope. Inside the envelope, the icosahedral core with a diameter of 33 to 40 [nm] is located. Inside the core, the RNA material is located. According to [3,4], HCV can cause not only hepatitis C but also liver cancer and lymphomas. HCV can cause liver fibrosis and chirosis. Liver fibrosis is the excessive accumulation of extracellular matrix proteins that occurs in most types of chronic liver diseases. HCV is the main cause of liver fibrosis however, alcohol abuse, and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) are also the main causes. Liver cirrhosis (end-stage liver disease) [5] is the impaired liver function that is caused by the formation of scar tissue known as fibrosis due to damage caused by liver disease. Hepatitis C is diagnosed using two blood tests i.e., the antibody test and the PCR test. The antibody blood test is used to determine if a suspected patient has been exposed to the hepatitis C virus which is achieved by testing for the presence of antibodies to the virus. The antibodies are produced by the patient immune system and are used to fight germs. Since it takes time for the patient's immune system to produce these antibodies this test will not show a positive reaction for some months after initial exposure to the hepatitis C virus. If the antibody test is positive it indicates that the patient was exposed to HCV at some stage and this does not mean that the patient is currently infected. In order to detect if the patient is currently infected the PCR test has to be utilized. The PCR test requires a blood sample and the test will check if the virus is still present by detecting if the virus is reproducing inside the patient's body. The positive PCR test indicates that the patient's body has not fought off the virus and that the patient is currently infected. So after a positive PCR test, it can be concluded that the patient has an active hepatitis C infection and additional blood and ultrasound test performed by specialists are required to check if the patient's liver has been damaged. The additional tests are blood tests and ultrasound scans. The blood test is used to detect liver damage or inflammation. On the other hand, ultrasound scans are used to test the patient's liver stiffness since stiffness suggests that the liver is scarred. Over the last decade, various artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have been used to detect Hepatitis C or Hepatitis C stage. The AI system was proposed in [6] that uses Gaussian support vector machines learning algorithm to predict the hepatitis C staging. The results of the conducted investigation with the Gaussian SVM learning algorithm achieved an accuracy of 97.9%. The K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and random forest have been used in [7] for the prediction of HCV in the Egyptian patient's dataset. The highest accuracy with KNN and random forest achieved are 51.05% and 54.56% in multi and binary class labels respectively.