title: Using knowledge maintenance for preference assessment.
abstract: Most real-life decisions require the decision maker to make trade-offs in order to fulfill multiple conflicting objectives. This is especially true in medical decision making while selecting the optimal therapy plan from among competing therapy plans for a patient. Multi-attribute utility theory provides a framework to specify these trade-offs for optimal decision making based on the preferences of the decision maker. However traditional preference-assessment techniques are difficult to implement and rarely elicit the true preferences of the decision maker. We describe a new preference-assessment method based on the concept of knowledge maintenance where the preference model is changed each time it makes an incorrect recommendation. The method is implemented in a decision-theoretic system to evaluate competing three-dimensional radiation treatment plans. The preference-assessment method leads to preference models which perform better than preference models elicited using traditional assessment techniques.
authors.affiliation: Department of Internal Medicine; Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
authors.forename: N L
authors.initials: NL
authors.lastname: Jain
authors.forename: M G
authors.initials: MG
authors.lastname: Kahn
mesh_terms: D000008:Abdominal Neoplasms / Q000532:radiotherapy; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D006801:Humans; D008175:Lung Neoplasms / Q000532:radiotherapy; D008297:Male; D011471:Prostatic Neoplasms / Q000532:radiotherapy; D011881:Radiotherapy, Computer-Assisted