Patient Records Retrieval System for Integrated Care in Treatment of Cervical Spine Defect

In clinical decision making, information on the treatment of patients that show similar medical conditions and symptoms to the current case, is one of most relevant information sources to create a good, evidence-based treatment plan. However, the retrieval of similar cases is still challenging and automatic support is missing. The reasons are two-fold: First, the query formulation is difficult since multiple criteria need to be selected and specified in short query phrases. Second, the discrete storage of multimedia patient records makes the retrieval and summary of a patient history extremely difficult. In this paper, we present a retrieval system for electronic health records (EHR). More specifically, a retrieval platform for EHRs for supporting clinical decision making in treatment of cervical spine defects with the information extracted from textual data of patient records is implemented as prototype. The patient cases are classified according to cervical spine defect classes, while the classification relies upon rules obtained from the corresponding defect classification schema and guidelines. In a retrospective study, the classifier is applied to clinical documents and the classification results are evaluated.