Heuristics in Medical Data Mining

Abstract

Deriving—or discovering—information from data has come to be known as data mining. Within health care, the knowledge from medical mining has been used in tasks as diverse as patient diagnosis (Brameier et al., 2000; Mani et al., 1999; Cao et al., 1998; Henson et al., 1996), inventory stock control (Bansal et al., 2000), and intelligent interfaces for patient record systems (George at al., 2000). It has also been a tool of medical discovery itself (Steven et al., 1996). Yet, it remains true that medicine is one of the last areas of society to be “automated,” with a relatively recent increase in the volume of electronic data, many paper-based clinical record systems in use, a lack of standardisation (for example, among coding schemes), and still some reluctance among health-care providers to use computer technology. Nevertheless, the rapidly increasing volume of electronic medical data is perhaps one of the domain’s current distinguishing characteristics, as one of the last components of society to be “automated.”