Prediction of Length of Hospital Stay in Preterm Infants - A Case-Based Reasoning View

The length of stay of preterm infants in a neonatology service has become an issue of a growing concern, namely considering, on the one hand, the mothers and infants health conditions and, on the other hand, the scarce healthcare facilities own resources. Thus, a pro-active strategy for problem solving has to be put in place, either to improve the quality-of-service provided or to reduce the inherent financial costs. Therefore, this work will focus on the development of a diagnosis decision support system in terms of a formal agenda built on a Logic Programming approach to knowledge representation and reasoning, complemented with a case-based problem solving methodology to computing, that caters for the handling of incomplete, unknown, or even contradictory in-formation. The proposed model has been quite accurate in predicting the length of stay (overall accuracy of 84.9%) and by reducing the computational time with values around 21.3%.

Waiting Time Screening in Diagnostic Medical Imaging - A Case-Based View

Due to the high standards expected from diagnostic medical imaging, the analysis of information regarding waiting lists via different information systems is of utmost importance. Such analysis, on the one hand, may improve the diagnostic quality and, on the other hand, may lead to the reduction of waiting times, with the concomitant increase of the quality of services and the reduction of the inherent financial costs. Hence, the purpose of this study is to assess the waiting time in the delivery of diagnostic medical imaging services, like computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging. Thereby, this work is focused on the development of a decision support system to assess waiting times in diagnostic medical imaging with recourse to operational data of selected attributes extracted from distinct information systems. The computational framework is built on top of a Logic Programming Case-base Reasoning approach to Knowledge Representation and Reasoning that caters for the handling of in-complete, unknown, or even self-contradictory information.