Analysis of a multilevel diagnosis decision support system and its implications: a case study

Comput Math Methods Med. 2012:2012:367345. doi: 10.1155/2012/367345. Epub 2012 Dec 23.

Abstract

Medical diagnosis can be performed in an automatic way with the use of computer-based systems or algorithms. Such systems are usually called diagnostic decision support systems (DDSSs) or medical diagnosis systems (MDSs). An evaluation of the performance of a DDSS called ML-DDSS has been performed in this paper. The methodology is based on clinical case resolution performed by physicians which is then used to evaluate the behavior of ML-DDSS. This methodology allows the calculation of values for several well-known metrics such as precision, recall, accuracy, specificity, and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC). Analysis of the behavior of ML-DDSS reveals interesting results about the behavior of the system and of the physicians who took part in the evaluation process. Global results show how the ML-DDSS system would have significant utility if used in medical practice. The MCC metric reveals an improvement of about 30% in comparison with the experts, and with respect to sensitivity the system returns better results than the experts.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Decision Support Systems, Clinical*
  • Decision Support Techniques*
  • Expert Systems
  • Gastroenteritis / diagnosis
  • Humans
  • Influenza, Human / diagnosis
  • Knowledge Bases
  • Male
  • Medical Informatics
  • Middle Aged
  • Models, Statistical
  • Physicians*
  • Pneumonia / diagnosis
  • Pyelonephritis / diagnosis
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Sensitivity and Specificity