Building decision support systems for treating severe head injuries

Abstract

In intensive care units, the patients, who are suffering from severe head injuries, usually enter a state of coma. To treat such patients, who are prone to a high risk of mortality, the neurologist adopts certain aggressive and informed decision-making procedures. Designing a decision support system that would automate or enhance this kind of treatment procedure is difficult due to the presence of unclear domain relationships, numerous interacting variables, time-criticality and real-time multiple inputs. We illustrate how the decision analysis framework can be exploited to build a consultative decision support system for the severe head injury management. Specifically, we need (a) to understand the head injury problem with its inherent uncertainties, (b) to structure the problem, and (c) to discern the decision process. The designed system accepts the prognostic factors of a particular patient as the inputs, and subsequently provides the treatment advice as the output. The effectiveness of the treatments is ranked in terms of patient recovery.