Bayesian networks for health care support (original) (raw)
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A comprehensive scoping review of Bayesian networks in healthcare: Past, present and future
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 2021
No comprehensive review of Bayesian networks (BNs) in healthcare has been published in the past, making it difficult to organize the research contributions in the present and identify challenges and neglected areas that need to be addressed in the future. This unique and novel scoping review of BNs in healthcare provides an analytical framework for comprehensively characterizing the domain and its current state. The review shows that: (1) BNs in healthcare are not used to their full potential; (2) a generic BN development process is lacking; (3) limitations exist in the way BNs in healthcare are presented in the literature, which impacts understanding, consensus towards systematic methodologies, practice and adoption of BNs; and (4) a gap exists between having an accurate BN and a useful BN that impacts clinical practice. This review empowers researchers and clinicians with an analytical framework and findings that will enable understanding of the need to address the problems of restricted aims of BNs, ad hoc BN development methods, and the lack of BN adoption in practice. To map the way forward, the paper proposes future research directions and makes recommendations regarding BN development methods and adoption in practice.
Decision support using Bayesian networks for clinical decision making
2012
This thesis investigates the use of Bayesian Networks (BNs), augmented by the Dynamic Discretization Algorithm, to model a variety of clinical problems. In particular, the thesis demonstrates four novel applications of BN and dynamic discretization to clinical problems. Firstly, it demonstrates the flexibility of the Dynamic Discretization Algorithm in modeling existing medical knowledge using appropriate statistical distributions. Many practical applications of BNs use the relative frequency approach while translating existing medical knowledge to a prior distribution in a BN model. This approach does not capture the full uncertainty surrounding the prior knowledge. Secondly, it demonstrates a novel use of the multinomial BN formulation in learning parameters of categorical variables. The traditional approach requires fixed number of parameters during the learning process but this framework allows an analyst to generate a multinomial BN model based on the number of parameters requi...
2014
Introduction: Bayesian networks are a form of statistical modelling, which has been widely used in fields like clinical decision, systems biology, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and influenza research, analyses of complex disease systems, interactions between multiple diseases and, also, in diagnostic diseases. The present study aimed to show the usefulness of Bayesian networks (BNs) in epidemiological studies. Material and Methods: 3,993 subjects (men 1,758, women 2,235) belonging to the public productive sector from the Balearic Islands (Spain), which were active workers, constitute the data set. Results: A BN was built from a dataset composed of twelve relevant features in cardiovascular disease epidemiology. Furthermore, the structure and parameters were learnt with GeNIe 2.0 tool. Taking into account the main topological properties some features were optimized, obtaining a hypothesized scenario where the likelihoods of the different features were updated and the adequate conclusions were established. Conclusions: Bayesian networks allow us to obtain a hypothetical scenario where the probabilities of the different features are updated according to the evidence that is introduced. This fact makes Bayesian networks a very attractive tool.
2016
(1) To develop a rigorous and repeatable method for building effective Bayesian network (BN) models for medical decision support from complex, unstructured and incomplete patient questionnaires and interviews that inevitably contain examples of repetitive, redundant and contradictory responses; (2) To exploit expert knowledge in the BN development since further data acquisition is usually not possible; (3) To ensure the BN model can be used for interventional analysis; (4) To demonstrate why using data alone to learn the model structure and parameters is often unsatisfactory even when extensive data is available. The method is based on applying a range of recent BN developments targeted at helping experts build BNs given limited data. While most of the components of the method are based on established work, its novelty is that it provides a rigorous consolidated and generalised framework that addresses the whole life-cycle of BN model development. The method is based on two original and recent validated BN models in forensic psychiatry, known as DSVM-MSS and DSVM-P. When employed with the same datasets, the DSVM-MSS demonstrated competitive to superior predictive performance (AUC scores 0.708 and 0.797) against the state-of-the-art (AUC scores ranging from 0.527 to 0.705), and the DSVM-P demonstrated superior predictive performance (cross-validated AUC score of 0.78) against the state-of-the-art (AUC scores ranging from 0.665 to 0.717). More importantly, the resulting models go beyond improving predictive accuracy and into usefulness for risk management purposes through intervention, and enhanced decision support in terms of answering complex clinical questions that are based on unobserved evidence. This development process is applicable to any application domain which involves large-scale decision analysis based on such complex information, rather than based on data with hard facts, and in conjunction with the incorporation of expert knowledge for decision support via intervention. The novelty extends to challenging the decision scientists to reason about building models based on what information is really required for inference, rather than based on what data is available and hence, forces decision scientists to use available data in a much smarter way.
Application of Bayesian Networks in Consumer Service Industry and Healthcare
Bayesian networks are powerful in data mining and analyzing causal relationships of an uncertain-reasoning problem. The implementation of Baye-sian networks in industry and healthcare diagnosis can facilitate the process of locating causations in complex issues. This study conducted two case studies by BayesiaLab in consumer service and healthcare domain. Case Study One used unsupervised learning and supervised learning on the individual data set of county road traffic volume in Indiana State and concluded that road type has the most significant impact on daily vehicle miles traveled. In Case Study Two, only supervised learning was used to observe the aggregated data of adverse mental health effect on civilians, deployed veterans and nondeployed veterans of different genders. Both types of veterans showed higher probability to have adverse mental health compared to civilians. In conclusion, Bayesian networks provided valid results to support prior research. Further research is needed to investigate the differences between using individual data and aggregated data, and to apply Bayesian networks in meta-analysis.
Building Bayesian Network Models in Medicine: The MENTOR Experience
Applied Intelligence, 2005
An experiment in Bayesian model building from a large medical dataset for Mental Retardation is discussed in this paper. We give a step by step description of the practical aspects of building a Bayesian Network from a dataset. We enumerate and briefly describe the tools required, address the problem of missing values in big datasets resulting from incomplete clinical findings and elaborate on our solution to the problem. We advance some reasons why imputation is a more desirable approach for model building than some other ad hoc methods suggested in literature. In our experiment, the initial Bayesian Network is learned from a dataset using a machine learning program called CB. The network structure and the conditional probabilities are then modified under the guidance of a domain expert. We present validation results for the unmodified and modified networks and give some suggestions for improvement of the model.
Exploiting causal functional relationships in Bayesian network modelling for personalised healthcare
International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, 2014
Bridging the gap between the theory of Bayesian networks and solving an actual problem is still a big challenge and this is in particular true for medical problems, where such a gap is clearly evident. We argue that Bayesian networks offer appropriate technology for the successful modelling of medical problems, including the personalisation of healthcare. Personalisation is an important aspect of remote disease management systems. It involves the forecasting of progression of a disease based on the interpretation of patient data by a disease model. A natural foundation for disease models is physiological knowledge, as such knowledge facilitates building clinically understandable models. This paper proposes ways to represent such knowledge as part of engineering principles employed in building clinically practical probabilistic models. The methodology has been used to construct a temporal Bayesian network model for preeclampsia -a pregnancy-related disorder. The model is the first of its kind and an integral part of a mobile home-monitoring system intended for use in daily pregnancy care. We conducted an evaluation study with actual patient data to obtain insight into the model's performance and suitability. The results obtained are encouraging and show the potential of exploiting physiological knowledge for personalised decisionsupport systems.
Clinical evidence framework for Bayesian networks
Knowledge and Information Systems, 2016
There is poor uptake of prognostic decision support models by clinicians regardless of their accuracy. There is evidence that this results from doubts about the basis of the model as the evidence behind clinical models is often not clear to anyone other than their developers. In this paper, we propose a framework for representing the evidence-base of a Bayesian network decision support model. The aim of this evidence framework is to be able to present all the clinical evidence alongside the BN itself. The evidence framework is capable of presenting supporting and conflicting evidence, and evidence associated with relevant but excluded factors. It also allows the completeness of the evidence to be queried. We illustrate this framework using a BN that has been previously developed to predict acute traumatic coagulopathy, a potentially fatal disorder of blood clotting, at early stages of trauma care.
A Review of Dynamic Bayesian Network Techniques with Applications in Healthcare Risk Modelling
2014
Coping with an ageing population is a major concern for healthcare organisations around the world. The average cost of hospital care is higher than social care for older and terminally ill patients. Moreover, the average cost of social care increases with the age of the patient. Therefore, it is important to make efficient and fair capacity planning which also incorporates patient centred outcomes. Predictive models can provide predictions which their accuracy can be understood and quantified. Predictive modelling can help patients and carers to get the appropriate support services, and allow clinical decision-makers to improve care quality and reduce the cost of inappropriate hospital and Accident and Emergency admissions. The aim of this study is to provide a review of modelling techniques and frameworks for predictive risk modelling of patients in hospital, based on routinely collected data such as the Hospital Episode Statistics database. A number of sub-problems can be considered such as Length-of-Stay and End-of-Life predictive modelling. The methodologies in the literature are mainly focused on addressing the problems using regression methods and Markov models, and the majority lack generalisability. In some cases, the robustness, accuracy and re-usability of predictive risk models have been shown to be improved using Machine Learning methods. Dynamic Bayesian Network techniques can represent complex correlations models and include small probabilities into the solution. The main focus of this study is to provide a review of major time-varying Dynamic Bayesian Network techniques with applications in healthcare predictive risk modelling.