A CASE-BASED CONSILIARIUS FOR THERAPY RECOMMENDATION (ICONS) - COMPUTER-BASED ADVICE FOR CALCULATED ANTIBIOTIC-THERAPY IN INTENSIVE-CARE MEDICINE

We report here on the system ICONS which utilizes case-based reasoning for medical decision support. As an application domain we have chosen the medical field of 'calculated antibiotic therapy' in an intensive care medicine setting. The system ICONS which runs on a personal compu ter suggests adequate antibiotic therapy regimen satisfying medical an d economic conditions. To speed up the process of finding an adequate antibiotic therapy for a current patient, case-based reasoning is used for finding previously documented similar cases and for modifying the m according to the requirements of the current patient. To reduce the memory capacity for the documentation of cases, collections of similar cases are clustered to prototypes. Medical knowledge is represented w ithin a hierarchy of such prototypes and cases and an additional conte xt-sensitive background knowledge-base. A knowledge acquisition tool w as programmed that arrows revisions of the background medical knowledg e-base by simple and comprehensive methods. In addition to the advanta ge of producing site-specific and time-dependent knowledge, case-based reasoning is a practical method for speeding-up the process of genera ting and evaluating hypotheses in medical classification tasks. Copyri ght (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.