Supporting triage of children with abdominal pain in the emergency room

The paper describes a methodology used for selecting the most relevant clinical features and for generating decision rules based on selected attributes from a medical data set with missing values. These rules will help emergency room (ER) medical personnel in triage (initial assessment) of children with abdominal pain. Presented approach is based on rough set theory extended with the ability of handling missing values and with the fuzzy measures allowing estimation of a value of information brought by particular attributes. The proposed methodology was applied for analyzing the data set containing records of patients with abdominal pain, collected in the emergency room of the cooperating hospital. Generated rules will be embedded into a computer decision support system that will be used in the emergency room. The system based on results of presented approach should allow improving of triage accuracy by the emergency room staff, and reducing management costs. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.