Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 May 11;9(1):21.
doi: 10.1007/s13755-021-00150-y. eCollection 2021 Dec.

Fast prototyping of a local fuzzy search system for decision support and retraining of hospital staff during pandemic

Evgeny A Bakin  1 , Oksana V Stanevich  1 , Daria M Danilenko  2 , Dmitry A Lioznov  1   2 , Alexander N Kulikov  1
Affiliations

Fast prototyping of a local fuzzy search system for decision support and retraining of hospital staff during pandemic

Evgeny A Bakin et al. Health Inf Sci Syst. .

Abstract

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic showed an urgent need for decision support systems to help doctors at a time of stress and uncertainty. However, significant differences in hospital conditions, as well as skepticism of doctors about machine learning algorithms, limit their introduction into clinical practice. Our goal was to test and apply the principle of "patient-like-mine" decision support in rapidly changing conditions of a pandemic.

Methods: In the developed system we implemented a fuzzy search that allows a doctor to compare their medical case with similar cases recorded in their medical center since the beginning of the pandemic. Various distance metrics were tried for obtaining clinically relevant search results. With the use of R programming language, we designed the first version of the system in approximately a week. A set of features for the comparison of the cases was selected with the use of random forest algorithm implemented in Caret. Shiny package was chosen for the design of GUI.

Results: The deployed tool allowed doctors to quickly estimate the current conditions of their patients by means of studying the most similar previous cases stored in the local health information system. The extensive testing of the system during the first wave of COVID-19 showed that this approach helps not only to draw a conclusion about the optimal treatment tactics and to train medical staff in real-time but also to optimize patients' individual testing plans.

Conclusions: This project points to the possibility of rapid prototyping and effective usage of "patient-like-mine" search systems at the time of a pandemic caused by a poorly known pathogen.

Keywords: COVID-19; Decision support algorithm; Fuzzy search; Patient-like-mine; Prototyping.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interestThe authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The principle of formation of the initial dataset
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
The structure of the developed DSS
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Results of a features selection procedure
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Graphical user interface
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Grange ES, Neil EJ, Stoffel M, Singh AP, Tseng E, Resco-Summers K, Fellner BJ, Lynch JB, Mathias PC, Mauritz-Miller K, Sutton PR, Leu MG. Responding to COVID-19: The UW Medicine Information Technology Services Experience. Appl Clin Inform. 2020;11(02):265–75. 10.1055/s-0040-1709715. http://www.thieme-connect.de/DOI/DOI?10.1055/s-0040-1709715 - PMC - PubMed
    1. Sutton RT, Pincock D, Baumgart DC, Sadowski DC, Fedorak RN, Kroeker KI. An overview of clinical decision support systems: benefits, risks, and strategies for success. npj Dig Med. 3(1) (2020). 10.1038/s41746-020-0221-y - PMC - PubMed
    1. Govindan K, Mina H, Alavi B. A decision support system for demand management in healthcare supply chains considering the epidemic outbreaks: A case study of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Transportation Research Part E: Logist Trans Rev. 2020;138:101967. 10.1016/j.tre.2020.101967. https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1366554520306189 - PMC - PubMed
    1. Decision Support System by Sapio Analytics. https://www.sapioanalytics.com/covid-19-decision-support-system/
    1. Vida Decision Support System for COVID-19. https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/vida-decision-support-system/overview/

LinkOut - more resources