COMP3330 History Assignment

Artificial Intelligence Applications In Medicine

Intelligent DSS

DSS In Medicine Today

Intelligent decision support system software has been used effectively by large healthcare providers since the early 1980s. These DSS have been used to review medical billings at a significantly lower cost than employing the hundreds of workers it took to review the accounts in the past.

Today, intelligent DSS are also being used successfully in many areas of the medical device industry, including cardiac monitoring and automated ECG, medical imaging, clinical laboratory analysis, respiratory monitoring, electroencephalography, and anaesthesia.

Some DSS also use AI to analyse data and create summarised reports based on the medically relevant information in the patient records. This can increase the accuracy of medical decisions, as well as save the time and costs associated with locating, reading and interpreting patient information.

Examples of intelligent DSS in regular use include:

DXplain:
A clinical decision support system developed at the Massachusetts General Hospital. It is used to assist in the process of diagnosis, taking a set of clinical findings including signs, symptoms, laboratory data and then produces a ranked list of diagnoses. It provides justification for each of differential diagnosis, and suggests further investigations. The system contains a database of crude probabilities for over 4,500 clinical manifestations that are associated with over 2,000 different diseases.
 
DXplain is in routine use at a number of hospitals and medical schools, mostly for clinical education purposes, but is also available for clinical consultation. It also has a role as an electronic medical textbook. It is able to provide a description of over 2,000 different diseases, emphasising the signs and symptoms that occur in each disease and provides recent references appropriate for each specific disease.
 

HELP system:
A knowledge-based hospital information system which began operation in 1980. It not only supports the routine applications of a hospital information system (HIS) including management of admissions and discharges and order entry, but also provides a decision support function.
 
The decision support system has been actively incorporated into the functions of the routine HIS applications. Decision support provides clinicians with alerts and reminders, data interpretation and patient diagnosis facilities, patient management suggestions and clinical protocols.
 
Activation of the decision support is provided within the applications but can also be triggered automatically as clinical data is entered into the patient's computerised medical record.
 

MEDai's Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS):
A disease management application that enables users to easily identify specific steps to monitor and improve outcomes while reducing healthcare costs. Features include patient evaluation, patient improvement tracking, monitoring the healthcare provider's performance against benchmarks, and detailed data discovery (down to the individual patient and physician level).

Figure 2: Sample report from MEDai's Clinical Decision Support System