The Research of Clinical Decision Support System Based on Three-Layer Knowledge Base Model

Abstract

In many clinical decision support systems, a two-layer knowledge base model (disease-symptom) of rule reasoning is used. This model often does not express knowledge very well since it simply infers disease from the presence of certain symptoms. In this study, we propose a three-layer knowledge base model (disease-symptom-property) to utilize more useful information in inference. The system iteratively calculates the probability of patients who may suffer from diseases based on a multisymptom naive Bayes algorithm, in which the specificity of these disease symptoms is weighted by the estimation of the degree of contribution to diagnose the disease. It significantly reduces the dependencies between attributes to apply the naive Bayes algorithm more properly. Then, the online learning process for parameter optimization of the inference engine was completed. At last, our decision support system utilizing the three-layer model was formally evaluated by two experienced doctors. By comparisons between prediction results and clinical results, our system can provide effective clinical recommendations to doctors. Moreover, we found that the three-layer model can improve the accuracy of predictions compared with the two-layer model. In light of some of the limitations of this study, we also identify and discuss several areas that need continued improvement.