Why a Clinical Decision Support System is needed for Tinnitus?

Tinnitus is the perception of a phantom sound and the individual’s reaction to it. Although much progress has been made, tinnitus remains an unresolved scientific and clinical issue, affecting more than 10% of the general population and having a high prevalence and socioeconomic burden. Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are used to assist clinicians in their complex decision-making processes, having been proved that they improve healthcare delivery. In this paper, we present a CDSS for tinnitus, attempting to address the question which treatment approach is optimal for a particular patient based on specific parameters. The CDSS will be developed in the context of the EU-funded "UNITI" project and, after the project completion, it will be able to determine the suitability and expected attachment of a particular patient to a list of available clinical interventions, utilizing predictive and classification machine learning models.Clinical Relevance — The proposed clinically utilizable CDSS will be able to suggest the optimal treatment strategy for the tinnitus patient based on a set of heterogeneous data.