title: Modeling paradigms for medical diagnostic decision support: a survey and future directions.
abstract: Use of computer based decision tools to aid clinical decision making, has been a primary goal of research in biomedical informatics. Research in the last five decades has led to the development of Medical Decision Support (MDS) applications using a variety of modeling techniques, for a diverse range of medical decision problems. This paper surveys literature on modeling techniques for diagnostic decision support, with a focus on decision accuracy. Trends and shortcomings of research in this area are discussed and future directions are provided. The authors suggest that-(i) Improvement in the accuracy of MDS application may be possible by modeling of vague and temporal data, research on inference algorithms, integration of patient information from diverse sources and improvement in gene profiling algorithms; (ii) MDS research would be facilitated by public release of de-identified medical datasets, and development of opensource data-mining tool kits; (iii) Comparative evaluations of different modeling techniques are required to understand characteristics of the techniques, which can guide developers in choice of technique for a particular medical decision problem; and (iv) Evaluations of MDS applications in clinical setting are necessary to foster physicians' utilization of these decision aids.
authors.affiliation: Interdisciplinary School of Scientific Computing, University of Pune, Pune, India. waghsk@gmail.com
authors.forename: Kavishwar B
authors.initials: KB
authors.lastname: Wagholikar
authors.forename: Vijayraghavan
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Sundararajan
authors.forename: Ashok W
authors.initials: AW
authors.lastname: Deshpande
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D057225:Data Mining; D016208:Databases, Factual; D003658:Decision Making, Computer-Assisted; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / Q000639:trends; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D017143:Fuzzy Logic