A Framework Using Computational Intelligence Techniques for Decision Support Systems in Medicine

The expressive growth in number of healthcare organizations has brought a great pressure on the Hospital Information Management. The increase in the number of patients imposes an extra burden to IT services of hospitals, whose information has to be used for administrative purposes but also has to be provided as actual aid for doctors. At the epicenter of this demand, Support Systems for Clinical Diagnostics, a kind of Decision Support Systems are especially designed to assist medical professionals in the exercise of the diagnosis itself. The two factors mentioned above (increase in the number of patients and growth in number of healthcare organizations) also demand the need for new and better knowledge management tools for these organizations. In line with this necessity, i.e. to build specialized applications of great efficacy in the shortest possible time, indicates that the design of a framework appears to be mandatory. A framework can be defined as an abstract design and implementation for application development on a particular problem domain. Here we provide the first ideas in the construction of an object-oriented framework for Clinical Diagnostics Supporting Systems development. Moreover we describe the first instance of the framework proposed, also the architecture and its principles of use.