DREAM: a shell-like software system for medical data analysis and decision support

A software system was designed whose aim is to support everyday scientific research of physicians in different fields of medicine. DREAM is a shell-like tool which can be customized embedding in it the desirable structure of a particular medical problem. Various basic statistical analyses are provided along with the decision support capabilities. The decision aid is proposed in two steps--feature selection and classifier design. Genetic algorithm is implemented as the feature selection procedure. The classifier design option includes crisp and fuzzy k-Nearest Neighbors rule and a two-level classification scheme based on majority rule on the votes of several first-level k-Nearest Neighbors classifiers. The system's performance is illustrated with a database from aviation medicine.