A Preliminary Approach for Learning Relational Policies for the Management of Critically Ill Children

The increased use of electronic health records has made possible the automated extraction of medical policies from patient records to aid in the development of clinical decision support systems. We adapted a boosted Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) framework to learn probabilistic rules from clinical hospital records for the management of physiologic parameters of children with severe cardiac or respiratory failure who were managed with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. In this preliminary study, the results were promising. In particular, the algorithm returned logic rules for medical actions that are consistent with medical reasoning.