The Design of a Cloud-based Clinical Decision Support System Prototype: Management of Drugs Intoxications in Childhood

摘要

The authors developed a mobile cloud-based clinical decision support system for drug poisoning in children. The system has a Client/Server architecture and provides a mobile application and a web service to be deployed on the Amazon Cloud infrastructure. Physicians benefit from a user interface to input patient data and to receive diagnosis and treatment protocol. The objective of this article is to help doctors, and particularly the beginners to manage and to treat children suffering from drug poisoning when toxicity is known or unknown. To do this, an intelligent system is developed. It is composed of an expert system, used when the toxic drug is known, and a case-based reasoning system applied when the toxic being ingested is unknown. Drug poisoning among children is a serious health problem in many countries; therefore, it requires more attention. Solutions must not rely only on educational and legislation efforts, but an interdisciplinary mobilization is necessary to achieve better improvement. In Algeria, the poisoning in children is gaining a considerable scale, but this phenomenon remains insufficiently investigated due to the lack of national data and statistics. However, in 2013, data collected by the Algiers Poison Control Centrel (2013) show that drug poisoning is at the top with 60% of cases treated and affects both children and adults. Statistics reveal a significant increase in the number of poisonings by drugs in recent years, from 688 cases recorded in 1991 to 5,312 in 2013, representing 67.2% of the total number of poisonings. As shown in Figure 1, children aged 2 to 5 years are the most vulnerable to poisoning (36.6%), followed by young adults aged 19 to 29 years (25.6%). This figure also indicates that 49.6% of adults are intoxicated, compared to 50.4% of poisoned children.