Combining Multi-Criteria Analysis With Cbr For Medical Decision Support

One of the most visible developments in Decision Support Systems (DSS) was the emergence of rule-based expert systems. Hence, despite their success in many sectors, developers of Medical Rule-Based Systems have met several critical problems. Firstly, the rules are related to a clearly stated subject. Secondly, a rule-based system can only learn by updating of its rule-base, since it requires explicit knowledge of the used domain. Solutions to these problems have been sought through improved techniques and tools, improved development paradigms, knowledge modeling languages and ontology, as well as advanced reasoning techniques such as case-based reasoning (CBR) which is well suited to provide decision support in the healthcare setting. However, using CBR reveals some drawbacks, mainly in its interrelated tasks: the retrieval and the adaptation. For the retrieval task, a major drawback raises when several similar cases are found and consequently several solutions. Hence, a choice for the best solution must be done. To overcome these limitations, numerous useful works related to the retrieval task were conducted with simple and convenient procedures or by combining CBR with other techniques. Through this paper, we provide a combining approach using the multi-criteria analysis (MCA) to help, the traditional retrieval task of CBR, in choosing the best solution. Afterwards, we integrate this approach in a decision model to support medical decision. We present, also, some preliminary results and suggestions to extend our approach.