A clinical decision support system for primary headache disorder based on hybrid intelligent reasoning

Clinical decision support system (CDSS) is an effective tool for improving healthcare quality. Since the clinical symptoms of some primary headache disorders in individual patients often overlap and that ill-defined boundaries for some headache features may be vague, current rule-based CDSS cannot perform as well as expected. In this paper, we develop a CDSS for primary headache disorder diagnosis based on rule-based and case-based reasoning in order to simulate a headache specialist's thinking process. First, the new case is evaluated by rule-based reasoning, the rules come from headache clinical guideline; second, if rule-based reasoning was unable to get accurate answer, case-based reasoning will find the most similar case in case library based on similarity matching. In particular, we define a similarity calculating method for primary headaches case. The final results show that the proposed approach improves the diagnostic accuracy dramatically compared to the rule-based primary headache diagnosis systems.