Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: Background: Disease and patient care processes often create characteristic mathematical and temporal patterns in time-stamped clinical events and observations, but existing medical record systems have a limited ability to recognize or visualize these patterns.System Design: This dissertation introduces the process-oriented approach to clinical data analysis and visualization. This approach aims to support specifying, detecting, and visualizing mathematical and temporal patterns in time-stamped patient data for a broad range of clinical tasks. It has two components: a pattern specification and detection strategy called PROTEMPA (Process-oriented Temporal Analysis); and a pattern visualization strategy called TPOD (Temporal Process-oriented Display).Evaluation: A study in the clinical research domain evaluated PROTEMPA's ability to identify and categorize patients based on diagnosis, disease severity, and disease progression by scanning for patterns in clinical laboratory results. A cognitive study in the patient care domain evaluated PROTEMPA and TPOD's ability to help physicians review cases and make decisions using case presentation software that displays laboratory results in either a TPOD-based display or a standard laboratory display.Results: PROTEMPA successfully identified laboratory data patterns in both domains. TPOD successfully visualized these patterns in the patient care domain. In the patient care study, subjects obtained more clinical concepts from the TPOD-based display, but TPOD had no effect on decision-making speed or quality. Subjects were split on which laboratory display they preferred, but expressed a desire to gain more familiarity with the TPOD-based display. Subjects reviewed data in the standard laboratory display for a variety of purposes, and interacted with the display in a complex fashion.Conclusions: The process-oriented approach successfully recognized and visualized data patterns for two distinct clinical tasks. In clinical research, this approach may provide significant advantages over existing methods of data retrieval. In patient care, comparative evaluation of novel data displays in context provides insights into physicians' preferences, the process of clinical decision-making by physicians, and display usability. TPOD's influence on concept acquisition is promising, but further research is needed regarding physicians' use of laboratory data for results review in order to determine how a process-oriented display might be deployed most beneficially.
Author: Andrew R. Post
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1499864566