Help and Advisory System in a Web-based System for Data Mining

Ankica Babic1 ,4 Ph.D., Werner Koele'15 M.Sc., Hans Granfeldt2, M.D.,

Urban Lonn3 M.D., Ph.D., Henrik Casimir Ahn2 M.D., Ph.D.
1. Medical Informatics, Dept of Biomedical Engineering, Link6ping University, Sweden.
2. Link6ping Heart Center, Link6ping University Hospital, Sweden.
3. Department of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery, Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden
4. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
5. Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Graz University of Technology, Austria.

Abstract physicians to identify the main risk factors. Case

The paper is describing the development of an
expert system for helping the end user to acquire
knowledge from departnental medical records and
databases. This is done within the Web-based
AssistMe' system, which is being developed to
support decisions concerning usually severely
critical patients in need of circulatory support. Two
main user groups are to be expected: medical staff
(surgeons, cardiologists, care providers, and
medical students) and patients. The help
functionalities guides through the clinical decision
support explaining existing functionalities and the
features. The advisory part provides more detailed
knowledge to work with the data, extract new
knowledge, validate and eventually visualize the
results of data mining.
The AssistMe System Help and Advice
Advice presents a short overview of expected
results when applying data mining methods and
instructions how to interpret what is presented on
the resulting screen. An advisory system aims at
motivating users to increase the usage of
implemented features. Finally, users should be able
to understand the system better and to perform
more complicated interaction with a system in order
to obtain sought after results. The main undertaking
of the advisory system is to increase understanding
of the available data mining methods.
The help is guiding through all the steps of a
program. Users can obtain help pages related to a
specific topic of the system that describes features
such as what could you do on this page. A help
page contains a short description concerning the
topics in question, clear instructions for interacting
with the system and, finally, a short preview of
feasible results.
Consulting on Data Mining
The three major groups of methods currently
available in the AssistMe domain are summarzing,
predictive modeling, and case based reasoning.
Different reports allow medical staff to assess an
actual patient and relate it to previously treated
cases. In addition, data mining based reports enable
1067-5027/01/$5.00 C 2001 AMIA, Inc.
based reasoning and rule-based reasoning are
providing insights into the patient outcomes
(mortality and morbidity).
Implementational Aspects
There are two kinds of templates implemeted in the
AssistMe sysrem: static pages, which are designed
to be used by the system developers only, and
dynamic pages, to enable authorized users to add
comments or explanations regarding both the
clinical variables and results of the data mining.
System developers can use templates to create a
help page that is stored on the Internet server. Once
a user sends a request for a specific help page the
whole page is transmitted to the user's computer
and stored temporarily in the cache memory of the
Internet browser. When a user repeats the request
for this page, the help page is opened quickly since
no downloading of information is necessary. An
advantage of this technique is that the AssistMe
Internet server does not need to be contacted.
On the other side, all calculations dealing with
patient cases need to be executed on the server
machine due to interactions with databases. A high
computing power is required when several users are
perfonning demanding data mining procedures at
the same time.
Discussion and conclusions
Maintenance of help and advisory system is one of
the keys of success of the whole AssistMe system.
Refreshing the existing information and following
development of new methods for data mining
should be followed by a timely and efficient update
of the help and advisory pages. End users have to
be given chances to evaluate the system and reflect
over its functionality both on-line and during
planed sessions. Heuristic approach to user
interface design provides guidelines for that
purpose. Future development of the AssistMe
system considers new clinical domains and a wider
circle of developers and users that will too have an
impact on the advisory and help system.
[1] http://omega.imt.liu.se/AssistMe/index.htm
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