An Evaluation of the Usefulness of Explanation in a CBR System for Decision Support in Bronchiolitis Treatment
Dónal Doyle, Pádraig Cunningham, Paul F. Walsh · 2005
Abstract. The research presented here explores the hypothesis that the deployment and acceptance of decision support systems in medicine will be enhanced if the basis for the recommendations produced by the systems is apparent. We describe a decision support system for advising on patients suffering from bronchiolitis. This system supports its recommendations with explanation cases and with some text that highlights aspects of the query and explanation cases. It also presents an estimate of its confidence in the recommendation. The main contribution of this paper is an evaluation of this system in a clinical context. The evaluation shows that this type of explanation does enhance the usefulness of the system for practitioners. 1