Prediction of Length of Hospital Stay in Preterm Infants - A Case-Based Reasoning View

• Main Author: Coimbra, Ana
• Publication Date: 2016
• Other Authors: Vicente, Henrique, Abelha, António, Santos, M. Filipe, Machado, José, Neves, João, Neves, José
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Download full: http://hdl.handle.net/10174/19643; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39630-9_10
• topic: Preterm Infants; Length of Stay; Neonatology; Knowledge Representation and Reasoning; Logic Programming; Case-Based Reasoning

The length of stay of preterm infants in a neonatology service has become an issue of a growing concern, namely considering, on the one hand, the mothers and infants health conditions and, on the other hand, the scarce healthcare facilities own resources. Thus, a pro-active strategy for problem solving has to be put in place, either to improve the quality-of-service provided or to reduce the inherent financial costs. Therefore, this work will focus on the development of a diagnosis decision support system in terms of a formal agenda built on a Logic Programming approach to knowledge representation and reasoning, complemented with a case-based problem solving methodology to computing, that caters for the handling of incomplete, unknown, or even contradictory in-formation. The proposed model has been quite accurate in predicting the length of stay (overall accuracy of 84.9%) and by reducing the computational time with values around 21.3%.