Mahshid Mohebbi - MSc in Accounting, Marvdasht Islamic Azad University, Iran
Mohammad Mahboubi - PhD in Health Services Administration Abadan College of Medical Sciences, Abadan, Iran
Fariba Ghahramani - MSc in Epidemiology, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran

Introduction: Diabetes is considered a great health problem due to its economic importance and the fact that it is a chronic disease. The aim of this study was to determine the costs imposed on diabetic patients using Artificial Neural Network.Methods: The study data were gathered by randomly investigating 396 individuals who referred to Kermanshah diabetic center. In this study, Artificial Neural Network using Multiple Layer Perception (MLP) was used to investigate the costs imposed on diabetic patients.Results: In this research, the variable related to treatment of diabetes was calculated through neural network in 8 different output layers. The eight output layers of expenses included physician's visit, medication, tests, hospitalization, radiology, treatment of symptoms, transportation, and counseling. In this study, the highest annual expenses were related to medication, tests, and radiology (2514369, 1010447, and 971282 dollars, respectively). In addition, the patients who presented the symptoms spent more money for treatment.Discussion: Considering the need to efficiently use the medical facilities, it is necessary that ways be used to predict the medical expenses. We came to the conclusion that neural network had great advantages over the regression model and could be used as an efficient tool for prediction of expenses and can replace the classical and statistical models

diabetes, Artificial Neural Network, expense