title: Temporal data mining for the quality assessment of hemodialysis services.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  This paper describes the temporal data mining aspects of a research project that deals with the definition of methods and tools for the assessment of the clinical performance of hemodialysis (HD) services, on the basis of the time series automatically collected during hemodialysis sessions.
  
  
  METHODS
  Intelligent data analysis and temporal data mining techniques are applied to gain insight and to discover knowledge on the causes of unsatisfactory clinical results. In particular, two new methods for association rule discovery and temporal rule discovery are applied to the time series. Such methods exploit several pre-processing techniques, comprising data reduction, multi-scale filtering and temporal abstractions.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We have analyzed the data of more than 5800 dialysis sessions coming from 43 different patients monitored for 19 months. The qualitative rules associating the outcome parameters and the measured variables were examined by the domain experts, which were able to distinguish between rules confirming available background knowledge and unexpected but plausible rules.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The new methods proposed in the paper are suitable tools for knowledge discovery in clinical time series. Their use in the context of an auditing system for dialysis management helped clinicians to improve their understanding of the patients' behavior.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Pavia, via Ferrata 1, 27100 Pavia, Italy. riccardo.bellazzi@unipv.it
authors.forename: Riccardo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Bellazzi
authors.forename: Cristiana
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Larizza
authors.forename: Paolo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Magni
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Bellazzi
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003628:Database Management Systems; D006801:Humans; D007676:Kidney Failure, Chronic / Q000628:therapy; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care; D006435:Renal Dialysis / Q000592:standards*