Automated Test Selection in Decision-Support Systems: a Case Study in Oncology

Decision-support systems in medicine should be equipped with a facility that provides patient-tailored information about which test had best be performed in which phase of the patient's management. A decision-support system with a good test-selection facility may result in ordering fewer tests, decreasing financial costs, improving a patient's quality of life, and in an improvement of medical care in general. In close cooperation with two experts in oncology, we designed such a facility for a decision-support system for the staging of cancer of the oesophagus. The facility selects tests based upon a patient's health status and closely matches current routines. We feel that by extending our decision-support system with the facility, it provides further support for a patient's management and will be more interesting for use in daily medical practice. In this paper, we describe the test-selection facility that we designed for our decision-support system in oncology and present some initial results.