Augmenting medical case base reasoning systems with clinical knowledge derived from heterogeneous electronic patient records

The development of medical case-based reasoning (CBR) systems necessitates the active involvement of medical experts. The work featured in this paper aims to minimize the involvement of medical experts in enhancing the knowledge content of medical CBR systems by using causal information contained in a generic electronic patient record (EPR) as an alternate source of CBR-compliant cases. We present an automated case acquisition and transcription information structure that features: (a) an agent to proactively procure XML-based EPRs from Internet-accessible EPR repositories; and (b) a case generation methodology to automatically transform generic EPRs into specialized CBR-compliant clinical cases (CCs). EPR-CC transformation is achieved by establishing a multi-level equivalence between the EPR and CC constructs .e. structural equivalence via meta-data constructs, terminological equivalence via a meta-thesaurus and conceptual equivalence via domain-specific ontologies. The transformed CCs are intended to be seamlessly incorporated within CBR-based medical diagnostic systems.