The Master Thesis “Rheumexpert—Webbasiertes Konsultationssystem zur differentialdiagnostischen Entscheidungsunterstützung und Verlaufsdokumentation für die Rheumatologie im extramuralen Bereich“ by Georg Preishuber reports on the development of Rheumexpert, a web-based consultation system for decision support and follow-up documentation of rheumatic diseases for general practitioners and medical specialists.
How it works: The patient data from a hospital information system or from a doctor’s practice is transferred via RESTful web service to the web application or created directly in the web application. Four input panels are managing the patient data: patient history, status of the joints and the vertebral column, laboratory test results and X-ray findings. The data gets transmitted over a secure connection and is saved on the server-side database. The ArdenSuite Server by Medexter then generates diagnostic hypotheses. The results in combination with safety factors for the conformity of the differential diagnosis with the patient’s symptoms are then displayed in the web application. The hypotheses are based on a knowledge-base that has been built by the Medical University of Vienna together with Medexter and been evaluated on the basis of two studies with a total 427 patients’ medical records. It consists of 618 single data elements, 76 symptoms and symptom combinations, and 20 suspected diagnoses. In the inference process, particular diagnostic vectors are aggregated by certainty factors from probability matrices, which express symptoms that confirm or exclude one of the contained differential diagnoses.