Modeling and processing up-to-dateness of patient information in probabilistic therapy decision support

OBJECTIVES Probabilistic modeling of a patient's situation with the goal of providing calculated therapy recommendations can improve the decision making of interdisciplinary teams. Relevant information entities and direct causal dependencies, as well as uncertainty, must be formally described. Possible therapy options, tailored to the patient, can be inferred from the clinical data using these descriptions. However, there are several avoidable factors of uncertainty influencing the accuracy of the inference. For instance, inaccuracy may emerge from outdated information. In general, probabilistic models, e.g. Bayesian Networks can depict the causality and relations of individual information entities, but in general cannot evaluate individual entities concerning their up-to-dateness. The goal of the work at hand is to model diagnostic up-to-dateness, which can reasonably adjust the influence of outdated diagnostic information to improve the inference results of clinical decision models. METHODS AND MATERIALS We analyzed 68 laryngeal cancer cases and modeled the state of up-to-dateness of different diagnostic modalities. All cases were used for cross-validation. 55 cases were used to train the model, 13 for testing. Each diagnostic procedure involved in the decision making process of these cases was associated with a specific threshold for the time the information is considered up-to-date, i.e. reliable. Based on this threshold, outdated findings could be identified and their impact on probabilistic calculations could be reduced. We applied the model for reducing the weight of outdated patient data in the computation of TNM stagings for the 13 test cases and compared the results to the manually derived TNM stagings in the patient files. RESULTS With the implementation of these weights in the laryngeal cancer model, we increased the accuracy of the TNM calculation from 0.61 (8 out of 13 cases correct) to 0.76 (10 out of 13 cases correct). CONCLUSION Decision delay may cause specific patient data to be outdated. This can cause contradictory or false information and impair calculations for clinical decision support. Our approach demonstrates that the accuracy of Bayesian Network models can be improved when pre-processing the patient-specific data and evaluating their up-to-dateness with reduced weights on outdated information.