Elsevier

Journal of Biomedical Informatics

Volume 56, August 2015, Pages 307-317
Journal of Biomedical Informatics

Emerging medical informatics with case-based reasoning for aiding clinical decision in multi-agent system

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2015.06.012Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Combined operation of MAS, CBR and ontologies can aide clinical decision-making.

  • MAS and its agent types define rules and interfaces for knowledge representation.

  • MAS ensures the cooperation between heterogeneous medical knowledge bases.

  • CBR restores experience to solve similar issues and to improve knowledge retrieval.

  • Ontology interprets user requests for question answering between MAS and user.

Abstract

This research aims to depict the methodological steps and tools about the combined operation of case-based reasoning (CBR) and multi-agent system (MAS) to expose the ontological application in the field of clinical decision support. The multi-agent architecture works for the consideration of the whole cycle of clinical decision-making adaptable to many medical aspects such as the diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, therapeutic monitoring of gastric cancer. In the multi-agent architecture, the ontological agent type employs the domain knowledge to ease the extraction of similar clinical cases and provide treatment suggestions to patients and physicians. Ontological agent is used for the extension of domain hierarchy and the interpretation of input requests. Case-based reasoning memorizes and restores experience data for solving similar problems, with the help of matching approach and defined interfaces of ontologies. A typical case is developed to illustrate the implementation of the knowledge acquisition and restitution of medical experts.

Keywords

Multi-agent system
Clinical decision support
Case-based reasoning
Knowledge representation
Ontology application

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