A pattern-based knowledge editing system for building clinical Decision Support Systems

Decision support in medicine is being more and more configured as an innovative and valuable way for promoting more consistent, effective, and efficient medical practices. The broad acceptance and efficient application of Decision Support Systems to medical settings strongly require some mechanisms to conveniently update and handle these systems with respect to medical progress or adaptation in the treatment of individual diseases. In this respect, this paper proposes a pattern-based knowledge editing system to guide and assist the creation and formalization of condition-action clinical recommendations to be used in knowledge-based Decision Support Systems (in the following, DSSs). This system has been devised with the aim of: (i) offering a set of patterns for easily inserting and editing such clinical recommendations; (ii) synergistically combining multiple knowledge representation techniques to instantiate these patterns within hybrid knowledge bases (KBs), made of if-then rules built on the top of ontological vocabularies; (iii) reducing the complexity of the formalization process, by graphically guiding the definition of hybrid KBs that could be functional in the context of clinical DSSs and enabling their automatic encoding into machine executable languages. A usability evaluation has been carried out, showing a good satisfaction of medical users with respect to the system implemented, and, thus, proving both the feasibility and usefulness of the approach proposed.