A case-based retrieval system for diabetic patient therapy

We propose a decision support tool based on the Case Based Reasoning technique, meant to help physicians in the retrieval of past similar cases, able to provide a suggestion about the revision of diabetic patients' therapy scheme. A case is defined as a set of features collected during a visit. A taxonomy of prototypical situ-ations, or classes, has been formalized; a set of cases belonging to these classes has been stored into a relational data-base. For each in-put case, the system allows the physician find similar situations that already took place in the past, both for the same patient and for dif-ferent ones. The reasoning process consists of two steps: 1) finding the classes to which the input case could belong; 2) finding the most similar cases from these classes, through a nearest neighbor tech-nique. The tool is integrated in the EU funded T-IDDM (Telematic management of Insulin Dependent Diabetes Mellitus) project.