A Decision Support System for Aiding Heart Failure Management

The purpose of this paper is to present an effective way to achieve a high-level integration of a clinical decision support system in the general process of heart failure care and to discuss the advantages of such an approach. In particular, the relevant and significant medical knowledge and experts' know-how have been modelled according to an ontological formalism extended with a base of rules for inferential reasoning. These have been also combined with advanced analytical tools for data processing. In particular, methods for the segmentation of echocardiographic image sequences and algorithms for ECG processing have been implemented and integrated into the system.