An overview of decision table literature 1982-1995.

This report gives an overview of the literature on decision tables over the past 15 years. As much as possible, for each reference, an author supplied abstract, a number of keywords and a classification are provided. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. The literature is classified according to application area, theoretical versus practical character, year of publication, country or origin (not necessarily country of publication) and the language of the document. After a description of the scope of the interview, classification results and the classification by topic are presented. The main body of the paper is the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.

A fuzzy-based medical system for pattern mining in a distributed environment: Application to diagnostic and co-morbidity

In this paper we have addressed the extraction of hidden knowledge from medical records using data mining techniques such as association rules in conjunction with fuzzy logic in a distributed environment. A significant challenge in this domain is that although there are a lot of studies devoted to analysing health data, very few focus on the understanding and interpretability of the data and the hidden patterns present within the data. A major challenge in this area is that many health data analysis studies have focussed on classification, prediction or knowledge extraction and end users find little interpretability or understanding of the results. This is due to the use of black-box algorithms or because the nature of the data is not represented correctly. This is why it is necessary to focus the analysis not only on knowledge extraction but also on the transformation and processing of the data to improve the modelling of the nature of the data. Techniques such as association rule mining and fuzzy logic help to improve the interpretability of the data and treat it with the inherent uncertainty of real-world data. To this end, we propose a system that automatically: a) pre-processes the database by transforming and adapting the data for the data mining process and enriching the data to generate more interesting patterns, b) performs the fuzzification of the medical database to represent and analyse real-world medical data with its inherent uncertainty, c) discovers interrelations and patterns amongst different features (diagnostic, hospital discharge, etc.), and d) visualizes the obtained results efficiently to facilitate the analysis and improve the interpretability of the information extracted. Our proposed system yields a significant increase in the compression and interpretability of medical data for end-users, allowing them to analyse the data correctly and make the right decisions. We present one practical case using two health-related datasets to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal for real data.Junta de Andalucia P18-RT-1765Ministry of Universities through the E

Information Systems and Healthcare XXXIV: Clinical Knowledge Management Systems—Literature Review and Research Issues for Information Systems

Knowledge Management (KM) has emerged as a possible solution to many of the challenges facing U.S. and international healthcare systems. These challenges include concerns regarding the safety and quality of patient care, critical inefficiency, disparate technologies and information standards, rapidly rising costs and clinical information overload. In this paper, we focus on clinical knowledge management systems (CKMS) research. The objectives of the paper are to evaluate the current state of knowledge management systems diffusion in the clinical setting, assess the present status and focus of CKMS research efforts, and identify research gaps and opportunities for future work across the medical informatics and information systems disciplines. The study analyzes the literature along two dimensions: (1) the knowledge management processes of creation, capture, transfer, and application, and (2) the clinical processes of diagnosis, treatment, monitoring and prognosis. The study reveals that the vast majority of CKMS research has been conducted by the medical and health informatics communities. Information systems (IS) researchers have played a limited role in past CKMS research. Overall, the results indicate that there is considerable potential for IS researchers to contribute their expertise to the improvement of clinical process through technology-based KM approaches

An overview of decision table literature.

The present report contains an overview of the literature on decision tables since its origin. The goal is to analyze the dissemination of decision tables in different areas of knowledge, countries and languages, especially showing these that present the most interest on decision table use. In the first part a description of the scope of the overview is given. Next, the classification results by topic are explained. An abstract and some keywords are included for each reference, normally provided by the authors. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. Other examined topics are the theoretical or practical feature of each document, as well as its origin country and language. Finally, the main body of the paper consists of the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.

A Knowledge-based Clinical Toxicology Consultant for Diagnosing Single Exposures

Objective: Every year, toxic exposures kill twelve hundred Americans. To aid in the timely diagnosis and treatment of such exposures, this research investigates the feasibility of a knowledge-based system capable of generating differential diagnoses for human exposures involving unknown toxins. Methods: Data mining techniques automatically extract prior probabilities and likelihood ratios from a database managed by the Florida Poison Information Center. Using observed clinical effects, the trained system produces a ranked list of plausible toxic exposures. The resulting system was evaluated using 30,152 single exposure cases. In addition, the effects of two filters for refining diagnosis based on a minimum number of exposure cases and a minimum number of clinical effects were also explored. Results: The system achieved accuracies (calculated as the percentage of exposures correctly identified in top 10% of trained diagnoses) as high as 79.8% when diagnosing by substance and 78.9% when diagnosing by the major and minor categories of toxins. Conclusions: The results of this research are modest, yet promising. At this time, no similar systems are currently in use in the United States and it is hoped that these studies will yield an effective medical decision support system for clinical toxicology