Models for Decision Support in Healthcare
Abstract
One of the many challenges in the field of medicine is to make the best decisions about optimal treatment plans for patients. Medical practitioners often have differing opinions about the best treatment
among multiple available options. While standard protocols are in place for the first and second lines of treatment for most diseases, a lot of variation exists in the treatment plans subsequently chosen. We propose to extensively study recommended treatment guidelines and plans for selected
rare and chronic diseases. As representative diseases we study Glioblastoma Multiforme (brain cancer) which is classified as a rare disease, and
Diabetes Mellitus, which is a nationally and globally widespread chronic
disease. A graph model is designed to capture the data pertaining to the
treatment options and historical evidence and further analyzed to discover sequential treatment patterns based on different outcome classes
based on longevity, complications etc. The notion of `Patient Similarity' would be explored to form cohorts of clinically similar patients. The
treatment patterns would be ranked, and highly ranked patterns would
be ordered depending on expected outcomes before being assigned to cohorts of patients. A prototype decision support system is planned for
recommending treatment options based on a patients clinical profile.
Evaluation of the models involves using historical data with various evaluation metrics and also by a qualitative assessment by expert physicians.