N. Shahsavar et al., EVALUATION OF A KNOWLEDGE-BASED DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR VENTILATOR THERAPY MANAGEMENT, Artificial intelligence in medicine, 7(1), 1995, pp. 37-52
Evaluation of knowledge-based systems differs from that of conventiona
l systems in terms of verification and validation techniques. Furtherm
ore, evaluating medical decision-support systems is difficult because
the field is thus far comparatively unexplored. This paper presents an
evaluation of a medical knowledge-based system called VentEx that sup
ports decision-making in the management of ventilator therapy. Real pa
tient data from 1300 hours of patient care involving 12 patients with
6 diagnoses are used to validate the knowledge base. The results range
from 4.5% to 15.6% disagreement between the setting recommendations p
roduced by VentEx and a gold standard, and 22.2% disagreement for reco
mmendations for weaning. A comparison between the standard and two phy
sicians showed that VentEx produced advice of the same quality as the
physicians.