Building a case-based reasoner for clinical decision support

Abstract

Orion Systems International Limited has recognised the need in the healthcare industry for an application to provide robust clinical decision support. One possible approach is to develop a case-based reasoner to support decisions made in the disease management process. We have undertaken a project to investigate the validity of using case-based reasoning for this task, specifically focusing on the management of treatment of diabetes patients. An application that uses case-based reasoning has been developed and tested. This paper describes the pre-processing of cases, the development of a case representation and similarity metrics and evaluation. Results show that case-based reasoning could be a valid approach, but more investigation is needed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.