Supporting Breast Cancer Decisions Using Formalized Guidelines and Experts Decision Patterns: Initial Prototype and Evaluation

Transparent decisions and its documentation of breast cancer patients' therapy are getting more important especially since modern therapeutic approaches favor personalized forms of treatment. The medical decisions for a treatment are very complex, because there are rules and different options for each patient. To support the decision process, we analyzed the current decision rules and implemented them in a prototype of a rule-based expert system. Thus, this system shall support the quality assurance regarding transparent documentation of individualized therapeutic decisions. For evaluating the system, we used data from a state tumor center and compared the decisions suggested by our system with expert ones. The system and the expert approach will be compared with each other as well as the differences in the treatment decisions. The first preliminary results show us that the human factor-like must be considered by creating a decision support system. The prototype delivers first results, which are restricted, but the results are promising for further developments.