A decision support system for lower back pain diagnosis: Uncertainty management and clinical evaluations
Authors: Lin, Lin; Hu, Paul Jen-Hwa; Liu Sheng, Olivia R.
Journal: Decision Support Systems (2006)
DOI: 10.1016/j.dss.2005.10.007
Lower back pain (LBP) is a common medical problem that deprives many individuals of their normal lifestyles and keeps them from routine activities. Diagnosing LBP is challenging because it requires highly specialized knowledge involving a complex anatomical and physiological structure as well as diverse clinical considerations. Although a handful of studies have proposed or developed systems to support LBP diagnosis and improve knowledge sharing, these systems have limited scope, lack systematic evaluations, and/or ignore diagnoses that consist of multiple parts (i.e., decision outcomes), each of which corresponds to a particular medical condition, disease, or abnormality. In this study, we design, implement, and evaluate a Web-based decision support system that employs an intuitive and easy-to-use framework to assess the patient’s information and recommend a diagnosis consisting of one or multiple parts. Our system design addresses the challenging characteristics of a LBP diagnosis and uses verbal probability estimation to represent and reason about the associated uncertainty. Our evaluations are systematic, including knowledge base verification, system validation using a modifie…