Using data mining techniques to explore physicians therapeutic decisions when clinical guidelines do not provide recommendations: methods and example for type 2 diabetes

摘要

BackgroundClinical guidelines carry medical evidence to the point of practice. As evidence is not always available, many guidelines do not provide recommendations for all clinical situations encountered in practice. We propose an approach for identifying knowledge gaps in guidelines and for exploring physicians' therapeutic decisions with data mining techniques to fill these knowledge gaps. We demonstrate our method by an example in the domain of type 2 diabetes.