Evolution Strategies for Ranking Several Trigeminal Neuralgia Treatments

Abstract

Trigeminal Neuralgia (TN) is a pain that is described as among the most acute known to mankind. TN produces excruciating, lightning strikes of facial pain, typically near the nose, lips, eyes or ears. Essential trigeminal neuralgia has questioned treatment methods. The following five treatment methods of the essential trigeminal neuralgia have been evaluated: low power laser, perineural infiltrations with streptomycin, skin grafts, sciatic nerve grafts and neurectomy. The problem is formulated as a multiobjective optimization problem. The following criteria are considered: hospitalization period, remission period, pain relief, decrease in the number of crises, decrease in pain level, decrease of the pain area and decrease in medication. The most common way to deal with a multiobjective optimization problem is to apply Pareto dominance relation between solutions. The question is: how can we make a decision for a multiobjective problem if we cannot use Pareto dominance for ranking solutions? We give a multiple criteria procedure using evolutionary strategies for ranking the treatment methods of the essential trigeminal neuralgia for the set of all evaluation criteria. Results obtained by our approach in a very simple way are same as the results obtained by applying weighted sum method. The advantage of the new proposed technique is that it is not requiring any additional information about the problem (like weights for each criteria in the case of weighted sum approach).