Building decision support systems for treating severe head injuries

In intensive care units, the patients, who are suffering from severe head injuries, usually enter a state of coma. To treat such patients, who are prone to a high risk of mortality, the neurologist adopts certain aggressive and informed decision-making procedures. Designing a decision support system (DSS) that would automate or enhance this kind of treatment procedure is difficult, due to the presence of unclear domain relationships, numerous interacting variables, time criticality and real-time multiple inputs. We illustrate how the decision analysis framework can be exploited to build a consultative DSS for severe head injury management. Specifically, we need to: (a) understand the head injury problem, with its inherent uncertainties, (b) structure the problem, and (c) discern the decision process. The designed system accepts the prognostic factors of a particular patient as input, and subsequently provides treatment advice as output. The effectiveness of the treatment is ranked in terms of patient recovery.