A belief rule based clinical decision support system to assess suspicion of heart failure from signs, symptoms and risk factors

A Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) to assess suspicion of a disease would avoid unnecessary cost of medical diagnosis. Heart Failure (HF) is a complex clinical syndrome of cardiac disorder. In the present paper, a Belief rule based (BRB) CDSS has been proposed to assess suspicion of HF by using signs, symptoms and risk factors. The recently developed generic rulebased inference methodology using the evidential reasoning approach (RIMER) was considered as the methodology for developing this CDSS. Netbean7.2's GUI and MySQL server have been employed to develop the system. This belief rule based CDSS can deal with various types of uncertainties found in clinical sings, symptoms, risk factors and domain knowledge. The knowledge based for this system has been developed by taking account of real patient data, obtained in consultation with specialists. The CDSS has been tested by using the data taken from the patients with breathlessness. It has been observed that the results generated by the system is reliable and thus facilitates to take decision to avoid unnecessary costly medical diagnosis.