title: Enabling the use of hereditary information from pedigree tools in medical knowledge-based systems.
abstract: The use of family information is a key issue to deal with inheritance illnesses. This kind of information use to come in the form of pedigree files, which contain structured information as tree or graphs, which explains the family relationships. Knowledge-based systems should incorporate the information gathered by pedigree tools to assess medical decision making. In this paper, we propose a method to achieve such a goal, which consists on the definition of new indicators, and methods and rules to compute them from family trees. The method is illustrated with several case studies. We provide information about its implementation and integration on a case-based reasoning tool. The method has been experimentally tested with breast cancer diagnosis data. The results show the feasibility of our methodology.
authors.affiliation: University of Girona, Campus Montilivi, P4 Building, Girona E17071, Spain. pablo.gay@udg.edu
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Gay
authors.forename: Beatriz
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: López
authors.forename: Albert
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Plà
authors.forename: Jordi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Saperas
authors.forename: Carles
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Pous
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D005260:Female; D030342:Genetic Diseases, Inborn / Q000235:genetics* / Q000517:prevention & control; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010375:Pedigree
keywords: Decision support; Feature construction; Knowledge-based system; Medical applications; Modeling; Structured data