Clinical Similarities: an innovative approach for supporting Medical Decisions

Taking decisions in the medical domain is a very complex
task. The context is strongly affected by uncertainty and the
possible undesired side effects of the treatments have to be
carefully considered. Currently, these decisions are based on
the physician's own experience and the evidences of the
published literature, according, when available, with the
philosophy of Evidence Based Medicine. The main issues of
this approach are that the own experience can be different,
and the results in the literature are sometimes contrasting.
For helping physicians while taking medical decisions, we are
proposing an innovative approach based on the idea of the
clinical similarity. Given a set of clinical variables, the
proposed approach selects patients that are similar,
presenting to the physician the respective decisions taken and
the corresponding clinical effects.