System Overview on a Clinical Decision Support System for Stress Management

There is an increased need for Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) in the medical community as ICT technology is increasingly used in hospitals as more and more patient data is stored in computers. A CDSS has the potential to play a vital role and bring essential information and knowledge to the clinicians and function as a second opinion in their decision-making tasks. In this paper, a CDSS in stress management is presented where the CDSS can help the clinicians in order to diagnosis and treat stress related disorders. As a foundation for the CDSS, the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) approach has been used as a core method of the system. The systems also combine other techniques from artificial intelligence in a multimodal manner, such as fuzzy logic, rule-based reasoning and textual information retrieval. In this paper we review our experiences and research efforts while developing the CDSS. The performance of the CDSS shows that the system can be useful both for trainee clinicians as an expert and as well as for senior clinicians as a second option. Moreover, the observation shows the current developments, and pros and cons of the CBR approach.