Re: DM: Medical data mining: successful examples?

[Miguel Artur Feldens]

Hi!

I have been working for two years in project called SIDI a which is
implementing systems for public health care system in Brazil. I have 
been
implementing and applying data mining technology for some time into 
this
project, with some good results.

The knowledge that has been discovered until now could be used, for
example, to detect fraud/errors in health care system, as well as 
providing
hospital administration useful information about each institution. 
Some of
the hundreds of rules that have been discovered have the form:

IF diagnosis was X AND procedure Y THEN internment is not required
WITH confidence...

After verified by the specialist, rules of the form above will be 
used in
intelligent alert systems, which can send a warning message, for 
example.

Rules of the form bellow are also very important:

IF diagnosis is X AND age > Y THEN patient is transferred
WITH confidence...

If the system identifies situations when patients are likely to be
transferred of, even worst, to die, such situations should be further
investigated, to check if that particular hospital needs equipament,
personel...

Some preliminary results of this work are presented in the paper:

- Feldens, M.A.& Castilho, J. M. V. Data mining with the 
combinatorial rule
model: an application in a health-care relational database. In: XXIII 
CLEI.
Valparaíso, Chile, 1997.

Which is available at (http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~feldens). This paper 
is
more centered in the learning algorithms and the implementation, some 
of
the results are presented also.

As our work in this project goes on, I hope to be presenting more 
practical
results realy soon.

Miguel

At 10:10 AM 3/25/98 -0500, Rao, Bharat wrote:
>Greetings,
>
>I'm looking to begin a project on data mining of electronic
>patient records, with a view to extracting patterns that could
>improve processes, cut costs, and allow better management
>of resources.
>
>If you know of any examples where data mining has been
>successfully applied for Utilization Management in medicine
>(either research, or better still application success stories),
>please send me (and/or the mailing list) some email
>
>Thanks
>
>Bharat
>
>R. Bharat Rao             E-mail:bharat@scr.siemens.com 
>Adaptive Information & Signal Processing, Siemens Corporate Research
>US Mail: 755 College Road East, Princeton, NJ 08540
>Phones: (609)734-6531(O) (609)734-6565(F) 
>
>
>

-----
Miguel Artur Feldens
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
feldens@inf.ufrgs.br
http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~feldens