A case-based reasoning view of thrombophilia risk

Thrombophilia stands for a genetic or an acquired tendency to hypercoagulable states that increase the risk of venous and arterial thromboses. Indeed, venous thromboembolism is often a chronic illness, mainly in deep venous thrombosis and pulmonary embolism, requiring lifelong prevention strategies. Therefore, it is crucial to identify the cause of the disease, the most appropriate treatment, the length of treatment or prevent a thrombotic recurrence. Thus, 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 approach to computing. The proposed model has been quite accurate in the assessment of thrombophilia predisposition risk, since the overall accuracy is higher than 90% and sensitivity ranging in the interval [86.5%, 88.1%]. The main strength of the proposed solution is the ability to deal explicitly with incomplete, unknown, or even self-contradictory information.

STAR Modeling of Pulmonary Tuberculosis Delay-Time in Diagnosis

Understanding what characterizes patients who suffer great delays in diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis is of great importance when establishing screening strategies to better control TB. Greater delays in diagnosis imply a higher chance for susceptible individuals to become infected by a bacilliferous patient. A Structured Additive Regression model is attempted in this study in order to potentially contribute to a better characterization of bacilliferous prevalence in Portugal. The main findings suggest the existence of significant regional differences in Portugal, with the fact of being female and/or alcohol dependent contributing to an increased delay-time in diagnosis, while being dependent on intravenous drugs and/or being diagnosed with HIV are factors that increase the chance of an earlier diagnosis of pulmonary TB. A decrease in 2010 to 77% on treatment success in Portugal underlines the importance of conducting more research aimed at better TB control strategies.