An Arden-Syntax-based clinical decision support framework for medical guidelines--Lyme borreliosis as an example.
Medicine is evolving at a very fast pace. The overwhelming quantity of new data compels the practician to be consistently informed about the most recent scientific advances. While medical guidelines have proven to be an acceptable tool for bringing new medical knowledge into clinical practice and also support medical personnel, reading them may be rather time-consuming. Clinical decision support systems have been developed to simplify this process. However, the implementation or adaptation of such systems for individual guidelines involves substantial effort. This paper introduces a clinical decision support platform that uses Arden Syntax to implement medical guidelines using client-server architecture. It provides a means of implementing different guidelines without the need for adapting the system's source code. To implement a prototype, three Lyme borreliosis guidelines were aggregated and a knowledge base created. The prototype employs transfer objects to represent any text-based medical guideline. As part of the implementation, we show how Fuzzy Arden Syntax can improve the overall usability of a clinical decision support system.
Department of Dermatology, Division of General Dermatology, Medical University of Vienna, Austria.
Alexander
A
Seitinger
Medexter Healthcare GmbH, Vienna, Austria.
Karsten
K
Fehre
Medexter Healthcare GmbH, Vienna, Austria.
Klaus-Peter
KP
Adlassnig
Section for Medical Expert and Knowledge-Based Systems, Center for Medical Statistics, Informatics, and Intelligent Systems, Medical University of Vienna, Austria.
Andrea
A
Rappelsberger
Department of Dermatology, Division of General Dermatology, Medical University of Vienna, Austria.
Elisabeth
E
Wurm
Department of Environmental Dermatology and Venereology, Medical University Graz, Austria.
Elisabeth
E
Aberer
Department of Dermatology, Division of General Dermatology, Medical University of Vienna, Austria.
Michael
M
Binder
D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D057225:Data Mining / Q000592:standards; D004282:Documentation / Q000592:standards*; D019983:Guideline Adherence / Q000592:standards; D006801:Humans; D008193:Lyme Disease / Q000145:classification*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D012660:Semantics; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled