Advances in medical decision support systems

The special February 2009 issue of Expert Systems, The Journal of Knowledge Engineering, contains papers associated with the latest advancements in medical decision support systems. Salem and researchers, in their paper 'Augmentation of a nearest neighbor clustering algorithm with a partial supervision strategy for biomedical data classification', propose a partial supervision strategy for a recently developed clustering algorithm to act as a classifier. Polat and colleagues, in their paper 'Comparison of different classifier algorithms for diagnosing macular and optic nerve diseases', compare classifier algorithms including the least squares support vector machine and the artificial immune recognition system for diagnosing macular and optic nerve diseases from pattern electroretinography signals. Hussain and coworkers, in their paper 'Electromyography signal analysis using wavelet transform and higher order statistics to determine muscle contraction', investigate the usefulness of a wavelet based noise removal technique of surface electromyography.