A hybrid Decision Support System for the risk assessment of retinopathy development as a long term complication of Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus.

The aim of the present study is to design and develop a Decision Support System (DSS) closely coupled with an Electronic Medical Record (EMR), able to predict the risk of a Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) patient to develop retinopathy. The proposed system is able to store a wealth of information regarding the clinical state of the T1DM patient and continuously provide the health experts with predictions regarding the possible future complications that he may present. The DSS is a hybrid infrastructure combining a Feedforward Neural Network (FNN), a Classification and Regression Tree (CART) and a Rule Induction C5.0 classifier, with an improved Hybrid Wavelet Neural Network (iHWNN). A voting mechanism is utilized to merge the results from the four classification models. The proposed DSS has been trained and evaluated using data from 55 T1DM patients, acquired by the Athens Hippokration Hospital in close collaboration with the EURODIAB research team. The DSS has shown an excellent performance resulting in an accuracy of 98%. Care has been taken to design and implement a consistent and continuously evolving Information Technology (IT) system by utilizing technologies such as smart agents periodically triggered to retrain the DSS with new cases added in the data repository.

SMARTDIAB: a communication and information technology approach for the intelligent monitoring, management and follow-up of type 1 diabetes patients.

SMARTDIAB is a platform designed to support the monitoring, management, and treatment of patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM), by combining state-of-the-art approaches in the fields of database (DB) technologies, communications, simulation algorithms, and data mining. SMARTDIAB consists mainly of two units: 1) the patient unit (PU); and 2) the patient management unit (PMU), which communicate with each other for data exchange. The PMU can be accessed by the PU through the internet using devices, such as PCs/laptops with direct internet access or mobile phones via a Wi-Fi/General Packet Radio Service access network. The PU consists of an insulin pump for subcutaneous insulin infusion to the patient and a continuous glucose measurement system. The aforementioned devices running a user-friendly application gather patient's related information and transmit it to the PMU. The PMU consists of a diabetes data management system (DDMS), a decision support system (DSS) that provides risk assessment for long-term diabetes complications, and an insulin infusion advisory system (IIAS), which reside on a Web server. The DDMS can be accessed from both medical personnel and patients, with appropriate security access rights and front-end interfaces. The DDMS, apart from being used for data storage/retrieval, provides also advanced tools for the intelligent processing of the patient's data, supporting the physician in decision making, regarding the patient's treatment. The IIAS is used to close the loop between the insulin pump and the continuous glucose monitoring system, by providing the pump with the appropriate insulin infusion rate in order to keep the patient's glucose levels within predefined limits. The pilot version of the SMARTDIAB has already been implemented, while the platform's evaluation in clinical environment is being in progress.

A communication and information technology infrastructure for real time monitoring and management of type 1 diabetes patients.

This paper is focused on the integration of state-of-the-art technologies in the fields of telecommunications, simulation algorithms, and data mining in order to develop a Type 1 diabetes patient's semi to fully-automated monitoring and management system. The main components of the system are a glucose measurement device, an insulin delivery system (insulin injection or insulin pumps), a mobile phone for the GPRS network, and a PDA or laptop for the Internet. In the medical environment, appropriate infrastructure for storage, analysis and visualizing of patients' data has been implemented to facilitate treatment design by health care experts.

A decision support system for breast cancer treatment based on data mining technologies and clinical practice guidelines.

Evidence based medicine is the clinical practice that uses medical data and proof in order to make efficient decisions in the field of the medical domain. Information technology services play a crucial role in exploiting the huge size of medical data involved. Furthermore health care society nowadays utilizes clinical guidelines [1][2] as a new assistant in their efforts to improve clinical decision efficacy. Clinical guidelines provide for the decrease of variance in medical decision making, leading to an improvement of clinical outcome. Therefore this paper focus is twofold. Improving the provision and visualization of disease specific, clinical data, providing for it's faster and more efficient use[l0], while making sure that consistency appears in the clinical practice by importing clinical guidelines in decision support systems.