A Physician's Decision-making Oriented Model of Cancer Chemotherapy toward Computer-assisted Chemotherapy Planning and Alerting System

Objective: For the development of computer-assisted chemotherapy planning system, we present a chemotherapy planning model emphasizing on decision-making process and associated heuristic knowledge. Methods: We analysed the information structure of chemotherapy regimens based on the requirements that we set. i) Creating a chemotherapy planning model emphasizing on physician's decision-making process. ii) Building up expressions to reason about particular knowledge associated with each decision-making process. Results: We developed a model consisting of three kinds of sub-models: an entity model of chemotherapy regimen, a process model of chemotherapy work-flow, and a model of expression language to represent decision criteria. For experiment and evaluation of the model, we implemented a prototype system. Conclusions: We developed a model for chemotherapy planning, which emphasize on physician's decision-making. Through the implementation of the prototype system, our model seems promising because it seems to reflect the knowledge of chemotherapy correctly.