Semi-automatic learning of simple diagnostic scores utilizing complexity measures

OBJECTIVE Knowledge acquisition and maintenance in medical domains with a large application domain ontology is a difficult task. To reduce knowledge elicitation costs, semi-automatic learning methods can be used to support the domain specialists. They are usually not only interested in the accuracy of the learned knowledge: the understandability and interpretability of the learned models is of prime importance as well. Then, often simple models are more favorable than complex ones. METHODS AND MATERIAL We propose diagnostic scores as a promising approach for the representation of simple diagnostic knowledge, and present a method for inductive learning of diagnostic scores. It can be incrementally refined by including background knowledge. We present complexity measures for determining the complexity of the learned scores. RESULTS We give an evaluation of the presented approach using a case base from the fielded system SonoConsult. We further discuss that the user can easily balance between accuracy and complexity of the learned knowledge applying the presented measures. CONCLUSIONS We argue that semi-automatic learning methods can support the domain specialist efficiently when building (diagnostic) knowledge systems from scratch. The presented complexity measures allow for an intuitive assessment of the learned patterns.