A statistically rule-based decision support system for the management of patients with suspected liver disease

The paper describes how a decision support system in liver diseases, mostly oriented to prediction of the necessity for liver biopsy, has been developed. The system designed is a hybrid one and consists of two parts: logical and statistical. The logical part contains rules, formulated on the basis of current medical knowledge, which enables recognition of clear cases; diseased or non-diseased. The unclear cases are classified on the basis of rules statistically extracted from databases. These rules have been reached after a comprehensive exploratory analysis of the sample of 165 patients with slightly to moderately raised levels of routine liver tests but without signs or symptoms of liver diseases. The extracted decision diagrams which simulate traditional medical diagnosis conduct have been found to be superior to discriminant analysis and probabilistic inductive learning. They use only a limited number of laboratory tests to detect the necessity for biopsy.