An Approach for Incorporating Context in Building Probabilistic Predictive Models

With the increasing amount of information collected through clinical practice and scientific experimentation, a growing challenge is how to utilize available resources to construct predictive models to facilitate clinical decision making. Clinicians often have questions related to the treatment and outcome of a medical problem for individual patients; however, few tools exist that leverage the large collection of patient data and scientific knowledge to answer these questions. Without appropriate context, existing data that have been collected for a specific task may not be suitable for creating new models that answer different questions. This paper presents an approach that leverages available structured or unstructured data to build a probabilistic predictive model that assists physicians with answering clinical questions on individual patients. Various challenges related to transforming available data to an end-user application are addressed: problem decomposition, variable selection, context representation, automated extraction of information from unstructured data sources, model generation, and development of an intuitive application to query the model and present the results. We describe our efforts towards building a model that predicts the risk of vasospasm in aneurysm patients.