Case-Based Reasoning for Antibiotics Therapy Advice

Rainer Schmidt a), Bernhard Pollwein b), Lothar Gierl a)


a)	Institut fr Medizinische Informatik und Biometric, Universitt Rostock
Rembrandtstr. 16 I 17, D-18055 Rostock, Germany
Email:	{rainer.schmidt , lothar.gierl}@medizin.uni-rostock.de
b)	Institut fr Ansthesiologie, Ludwig-Maximilians Universitt Mnchcn
Marchioninistr. 15, D-8 1377 Mnchen, Germany



Abstract
In this paper, we describe case-based techniques in a medical application. We
have developed a prototype of an antibiotics therapy adviser within the ICONS
project, where the main advantage of applying CBR techniques is to speed-up
the process of computing advisable therapies. However, some adaptations do
not really belong to the Case-Based Reasoning paradigm though information
from former cases is considered. They deal with rather typical medical tasks,
namely modifications due to information updates. In our incrementally working
system we have attempted to solve the problem of the continuously increasing
number of stored cases by generalising from specific single eases to more
general prototypes and by subsequently erasing redundant cases. Here we present
results of experiments with threshold settings for our prototype architecture.
The results show that the chosen design, which has mainly been founded on
experiences with diagnostic applications, is not only advantageous for this
therapeutic task, but that it contains a slight drawback as well.


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