Data Mining and Medical
Knowledge Management:
Cases and Applications
Petr Berka
University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic
Jan Rauch
University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic
Djamel Abdelkader Zighed
University of Lumiere Lyon 2, France
Hershey • New York
Medical inforMation science reference
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Ján Paralič, Technical University, Košice, Slovak Republic
Luis Torgo, LIAAD-INESC Porto LA, Portugal
Blaž Župan, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
List of Reviewers
Ricardo Bellazzi, University of Pavia, Italy
Petr Berka, University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic
Bruno Crémilleux, University Caen, France
Peter Eklund, Umeå University, Umeå, Sveden
Radim Jiroušek, Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
Jiří Kléma, Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic
Mila Kwiatkovska, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, Canada
Martin Labský, University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic
Lenka Lhotská, Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic
Ján Paralić, Technical University, Kosice, Slovak Republic
Vincent Pisetta, University Lyon 2, France
Simon Marcellin, University Lyon 2, France
Jan Rauch, University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic
Marisa Sánchez, National University, Bahía Blanca, Argentina
Ahmed-El Sayed, University Lyon 2, France
Olga Štěpánková, Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic
Vojtěch Svátek, University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic
Arnošt Veselý, Czech University of Life Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
Djamel Zighed, University Lyon 2, France
Foreword xiv
Preface xix
Acknowledgment xxiii
Section I
Theoretical Aspects
Chapter I
Data, Information and Knowledge 1
Pavel Brazdil, LIAAD - INESC Porto L.A., Portugal; University of Porto, Portugal
Altamiro Costa-Pereira, University of Porto, Portugal; CINTESIS, Portugal
Table of Contents
Chapter IV
Classication and Prediction with Neural Networks 76
Arnošt Veselý, Czech University of Life Sciences, Czech Republic
Chapter V
Preprocessing Perceptrons and Multivariate Decision Limits 108
Patrik Eklund, Umeå University, Sweden
Lena Kallin W
estin, Umeå University, Sweden
Section II
General
Applications
Chapter VI
Image Registration for Biomedical Information Integration 122
Xiu Ying Wang, BMIT Research Group, The University of Sydney, Australia
Dag
an Feng, BMIT Research Group, The University of Sydney, Australia; Hong Kong Polytechnic
University, Hong Kong
Chapter
VII
ECG Processing 137
Lenka Lhotská, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic
Václav
Chudáček,CzechTechnicalUniversityinPrague,CzechRepublic
Michal Huptych, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic
Chapter VIII
EEG Data Mining Using PCA 161
Lenka Lhotská, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic
Discovering Knowledge from Local Patterns in SAGE Data 251
Bruno Crémilleux, Université de Caen, France
Arnaud Soulet, Université François Rabelais de T
ours, France
Jiří
Kléma,CzechTechnicalUniversity,inPrague,CzechRepublic
Céline Hébert, Université de Caen, France
Olivier Gandrillon, Université de Lyon, France
Chapter XIII
Gene Expression Mining Guided by Background Knowledge 268
JiříKléma,
CzechTechnicalUniversityinPrague,CzechRepublic
FilipŽelezný,CzechTechnicalUniversityinPrague,CzechRepublic
IgorTrajkovski,JožefStefanInstitute,Slovenia
Filip Karel, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic
Bruno Crémilleux, Université de Caen, France
Jakub Tolar, University of Minnesota, USA
Chapter XIV
Mining Tinnitus Database for Knowledge 293
Pamela L. Thompson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
Xin Zhang, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, USA
W
enxin Jiang, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
Zbigniew W. Ras, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
Pawel Jastreboff, Emory University School of Medicine, USA
Chapter XV
Gaussian-Stacking Multiclassiers for Human Embryo Selection 307
Dinora A. Morales, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Endika Bengoetxea, University of the Basque Country
, Spain
Preface xix
Acknowledgment xxiii
Section I
Theoretical Aspects
This section provides a theoretical and methodological background for the remaining parts of the book.
It denes and explains basic notions of data mining and knowledge management, and discusses some
general methods.
Chapter I
Data, Information and Knowledge 1
Jana Zvárová, Institute of Computer Science of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech
R
ep
ublic v.v.i., Czech Republic; Center of Biomedical Informatics, Czech Republic
Arnošt Veselý, Institute of Computer Science of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
v.v.i., Czech Republic; Czech University of Life Sciences, Czech Republic
Igor V
ajda, Institutes of Computer Science and Information Theory and Automation of
the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic v.v.i., Czech Republic
This chapter introduces the basic concepts of medical informatics: data, information, and knowledge. It
shows how these concepts are interrelated and can be used for decision support in medicine. All discussed
approaches are illustrated on one simple medical example.
Chapter II
Ontologies in the Health Field 37
Michel Simonet, Laboratoire TIMC-IMAG, Institut de l’Ingénierie et de l’Information de Santé,
France
Radja
Messai, Laboratoire TIMC-IMAG, Institut de l’Ingénierie et de l’Information de Santé,
France
Chapter V
Preprocessing Perceptrons and Multivariate Decision Limits 108
Patrik Eklund, Umeå University, Sweden
Lena Kallin W
estin, Umeå University, Sweden
This
chapter introduces classication networks composed of preprocessing layers and classication
networks, and compares them with “classical” multilayer percpetrons on three medical case studies.
Section II
General Applications
This section presents work that is general in the sense of a variety of methods or variety of problems
described in each of the chapters.
Chapter VI
Image Registration for Biomedical Information Integration 122
Xiu Ying Wang, BMIT Research Group, The University of Sydney, Australia
Dag
an Feng, BMIT Research Group, The University of Sydney, Australia; Hong Kong Polytechnic
University, Hong Kong
In this chapter, biomedical image registration and fusion, which is an effective mechanism to assist medical
knowledge discovery by integrating and simultaneously representing relevant information from diverse
imaging resources, is introduced. This chapter covers fundamental knowledge and major methodologies
of biomedical image registration, and major applications of image registration in biomedicine.
Chapter VII
ECG Processing 137
Lenka Lhotská, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic
Václav
Chudáček,CzechTechnicalUniversityinPrague,CzechRepublic
Michal Huptych, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic
This chapter describes methods for preprocessing, analysis, feature extraction, visualization, and clas-
Management of Medical Website Quality Labels via Web Mining 206
V
angelisKarkaletsis,NationalCenterofScienticResearch“Demokritos”,Greece
Konstantinos
Stamatakis,NationalCenterofScienticResearch“Demokritos”,Greece
PythagorasKarampiperis,NationalCenterofScienticResearch“Demokritos”,Greece
Martin Labský, University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic
MarekRůžička,UniversityofEconomics,Prague,CzechRepublic
VojtěchSvátek,UniversityofEconomics,Prague,CzechRepublic
Enrique Amigó Cabrera, ETSI Informática, UNED, Spain
Matti Pöllä, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Miquel Angel Mayer, Medical Association of Barcelona (COMB), Spain
Dagmar Villarroel Gonzales, Agency for Quality in Medicine (AquMed), Germany
This chapter deals with the problem of quality assessment of medical Web sites. The so called “quality
labeling” process can benet from employment of Web mining and information extraction techniques,
in combination with exible methods of Web-based information management developed within the
Semantic Web initiative.
Chapter XI
Two Case-Based Systems for Explaining Exceptions in Medicine 227
Rainer Schmidt, University of Rostock, Germany
In medicine, doctors are often confronted with exceptions, both in medical practice or in medical research.
One proper method of how to deal with exceptions is case-based systems. This chapter presents two such
systems. The rst one is a knowledge-based system for therapy support. The second one is designed for
medical studies or research. It helps to explain cases that contradict a theoretical hypothesis.
Section III
Specic Cases
This part shows results of several case studies of (mostly) data mining applied to various specic medi-
cal problems. The problems covered by this part, range from discovery of biologically interpretable
knowledge from gene expression data, over human embryo selection for the purpose of human in-vitro
fertilization treatments, to diagnosis of various diseases based on machine learning techniques.
olina at Pembroke, USA
W
enxin Jiang, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
Zbigniew W. Ras, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
Pawel Jastreboff, Emory University School of Medicine, USA
This chapter describes the process used to mine a database containing data, related to patient visits dur-
ing Tinnitus Retraining Therapy. The presented research focused on analysis of existing data, along with
automating the discovery of new and useful features in order to improve classication and understanding
of tinnitus diagnosis.
Chapter XV
Gaussian-Stacking Multiclassiers for Human Embryo Selection 307
Dinora A. Morales, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Endika Bengoetxea, University of the Basque Country
, Spain
Pedro Larrañaga, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
T
his chapter describes a new multi-classication system using Gaussian networks to combine the outputs
(probability distributions) of standard machine learning classication algorithms. This multi-classica-
tion technique has been applied to a complex real medical problem: The selection of the most promising
embryo-batch for human in-vitro fertilization treatments.
Chapter XVI
Mining Tuberculosis Data 332
Marisa A. Sánchez, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina
Sonia Ur
emovich, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina
Pablo Acrogliano, Hospital Interzonal Dr. José Penna, Argentina
This chapter reviews current policies of tuberculosis control programs for the diagnosis of tuberculosis.
A data mining project that uses WHO’s Direct Observation of Therapy data to analyze the relationship
among different variables and the tuberculosis diagnostic category registered for each patient is then
presented.
Current research directions are looking at Data Mining (DM) and Knowledge Management (KM) as
complementary and interrelated elds, aimed at supporting, with algorithms and tools, the lifecycle of
knowledge, including its discovery, formalization, retrieval, reuse, and update. While DM focuses on
the extraction of patterns, information, and ultimately knowledge from data (Giudici, 2003; Fayyad et
al., 1996; Bellazzi, Zupan, 2008), KM deals with eliciting, representing, and storing explicit knowledge,
as well as keeping and externalizing tacit knowledge (Abidi, 2001; Van der Spek, Spijkervet, 1997).
Although DM and KM have stemmed from different cultural backgrounds and their methods and tools
are different, too, it is now clear that they are dealing with the same fundamental issues, and that they
must be combined to effectively support humans in decision making.
The capacity of DM to analyze data and to extract models, which may be meaningfully interpreted
and transformed into knowledge, is a key feature for a KM system. Moreover, DM can be a very useful
instrument to transform the tacit knowledge contained in transactional data into explicit knowledge, by
making experts’ behavior and decision-making activities emerge.
On the other hand, DM is greatly empowered by KM. The available, or background knowledge, (BK)
is exploited to drive data gathering and experimental planning, and to structure the databases and data
warehouses. BK is used to properly select the data, choose the data mining strategies, improve the data
mining algorithms, and nally evaluates the data mining results (Bellazzi, Zupan, 2008; Bellazzi, Zupan,
2008). The output of the data analysis process is an update of the domain knowledge itself, which may
lead to new experiments and new data gathering (see Figure 1).
If the interaction and integration of DM and KM is important in all application areas, in medical
applications it is essential (Cios, Moore, 2002). Data analysis in medicine is typically part of a complex
reasoning process which largely depends on BK. Diagnosis, therapy, monitoring, and molecular research
are always guided by the existing knowledge of the problem domain, on the population of patients or
on the specic patient under consideration. Since medicine is a safety critical context (Fox, Das, 2000),
Patterns
interpretation
Background
Knowledge
Experimental design
healthcare organizations (HCO). HCOs have currently evolved into complex enterprises in which
managing knowledge and information is a crucial success factor in order to improve efciency, (i.e. the
capability of optimizing the use of resources, and efcacy, i.e. the capability to reach the clinical treat-
ment outcome) (Stefanelli, 2004). The current emphasis on Evidence-based Medicine (EBM) is one of
the main reasons to utilize KM in clinical practice. EBM proposes strategies to apply evidence gained
from scientic studies for the care of individual patients (Sackett, 2004). Such strategies are usually
provided as clinical practice guidelines or individualized decision making rules and may be considered
as an example of explicit knowledge. Of course, HCO must also manage the empirical and experiential
(or tacit) knowledge mirrored by the day-by-day actions of healthcare providers. An important research
effort is therefore to augment the use of the so-called “process data” in order to improve the quality of
care (Montani et al., 2006; Bellazzi et al. 2005). These process data include patients’ clinical records,
healthcare provider actions (e.g. exams, drug administration, surgeries) and administrative data (admis-
sions, discharge, exams request). DM may be the natural instrument to deal with this problem, providing
the tools for highlighting patterns of actions and regularities in the data, including the temporal relation-
ships between the different events occurring during the HCO activities (Bellazzi et al. 2005).
Biomedical research is another driving force that is currently pushing towards the integration of KM
and DM. The discovery of the genetic factors underlying the most common diseases, including for example
cancer and diabetes, is enabled by the concurrence of two main factors: the availability of data at the
genomic and proteomic scale and the construction of biological data repositories and ontologies, which
accumulate and organize the considerable quantity of research results (Lang, 2006). If we represent the
current research process as a reasoning cycle including inference from data, ranking of the hypothesis
and experimental planning, we can easily understand the crucial role of DM and KM (see Figure 2).
Hypothesis
Data
and evidence
Data M ining
Data Analysis
Experiment
planning
of information available on the Web in digital format, this ambitious goal is now at hand (Cimiano et
al., 2005).
The interaction between KM and DM is also shown by the current efforts on the construction of
automated systems for ltering association rules learned from medical transaction databases. The avail-
ability of a formal ontology allows the ranking of association rules by clarifying what are the rules
conrming available medical knowledge, what are surprising but plausible, and nally, the ones to be
ltered out (Raj et al., 2008).
Another area where DM and KM are jointly exploited is Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). CBR is a
problem solving paradigm that utilizes the specic knowledge of previously experienced situations,
called cases. It basically consists in retrieving past cases that are similar to the current one and in reus-
ing (by, if necessary, adapting) solutions used successfully in the past; the current case can be retained
and put into the case library. In medicine, CBR can be seen as a suitable instrument to build decision
support tools able to use tacit knowledge (Schmidt et al., 2001). The algorithms for computing the case
similarity are typically derived from the DM eld. However, case retrieval and situation assessment can
be successfully guided by the available formalized background knowledge (Montani, 2008).
Within the different technologies, some methods seem particularly suitable for fostering DM and KM
integration. One of those is represented by Bayesian Networks (BN), which have now reached maturity
and have been adopted in different biomedical application areas (Hamilton et al., 1995; Galan et al., 2002;
Luciani et al., 2003). BNs allow to explicitly represent the knowledge available in terms of a directed
acyclic graph structure and a collection of conditional probability tables, and to perform probabilistic
inference (Spiegelhalter, Lauritzen, 1990). Moreover, several algorithms are available to learn both the
graph structure and the underlying probabilistic model from the data (Cooper, Herskovits, 1992; Ramoni,
Sebastiani, 2001). BNs can thus be considered at the conjunction of knowledge representation, automated
reasoning, and machine learning. Other approaches, such as association and classication rules, joining
the declarative nature of rules, and the availability of learning mechanisms including inductive logic
programming, are of great potential for effectively merging DM and KM (Amini et al., 2007).
At present, the widespread adoption of software solutions that may effectively implement KM
strategies in the clinical settings is still to be achieved. However, the increasing abundance of data in
bioinformatics, in health care insurance and administration, and in the clinics, is forcing the emergence
of clinical data warehouses and data banks. The use of such data banks will require an integrated KM-
Cimiano, A., Hoto, A., & Staab, S. (2005). Learning concept hierarchies from text corpora using formal
concept analysis. Journal
of
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Cios, K. J., & Moore, G. W. (2002). Uniqueness of medical data mining. Artif Intell Med, 26, 1-24.
Cooper, G. F, & Herskovits, E. (1992). A Bayesian method for the induction of probabilistic networks
from data. Machine Learning, 9, 309-347.
Dudley, J., & Butte, A. J. (2008). Enabling integrative genomic analysis of high-impact human diseases
through text mining. Pac Symp Biocomput, 580-591.
Fayyad, U., Piatetsky-Shapiro, G., & Smyth, P. (1996). Data mining and knowledge discovery in data-
bases. Communications of the ACM, 39, 24-26.
Fox, J., & Das, S. K. (2000). Safe
andsound:
articialintelligenceinhazardousapplications. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Galan, S. F., Aguado, F., Diez, F. J., & Mira, J. (2002). NasoNet, modeling the spread of nasopharyngeal
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Preface
The basic notion of the book “Data Mining and Medical Knowledge Management: Cases and Applica-
tions” is knowledge. A number of denitions of this notion can be found in the literature:
• Knowledge is the sum of what is known: the body of truth, information, and principles acquired
by mankind.
• Knowledge is human expertise stored in a person’s mind, gained through experience, and interac-
tion with the person’s environment.
• Knowledge is information evaluated and organized by the human mind so that it can be used pur-
posefully, e.g., conclusions or explanations.
• Knowledge is information about the world that allows an expert to make decisions.
There are also various classications of knowledge. A key distinction made by the majority of
knowledge management practitioners is Nonaka's reformulation of Polanyi's distinction between tacit
and explicit knowledge. By denition, tacit knowledge is knowledge that people carry in their minds
and is, therefore, difcult to access. Often, people are not aware of the knowledge they possess or how
it can be valuable to others. Tacit knowledge is considered more valuable because it provides context for
people, places, ideas, and experiences. Effective transfer of tacit knowledge generally requires extensive
personal contact and trust. Explicit knowledge is knowledge that has been or can be articulated, codied,
and stored in certain media. It can be readily transmitted to others. The most common forms of explicit
knowledge are manuals, documents, and procedures. We can add a third type of knowledge to this list,
the implicit knowledge. This knowledge is hidden in a large amount of data stored in various databases
but can be made explicit using some algorithmic approach. Knowledge can be further classied into
procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge. Procedural knowledge is often referred to as knowing
how to do something. Declarative knowledge refers to knowing that something is true or false.
In this book we are interested in knowledge expressed in some language (formal, semi-formal) as a
kind of model that can be used to support the decision making process. The book tackles the notion of
knowledge (in the domain of medicine) from two different points of view: data mining and knowledge
management.
Knowledge Management (KM) comprises a range of practices used by organizations to identify,
create, represent, and distribute knowledge. Knowledge Management may be viewed from each of the
following perspectives:
ECG), laboratory data, structural data (e.g. molecules), and textual data (e.g. interviews with patients,
physician’s notes). Thus there is a need for efcient mining in images, graphs, and text, which is more
difcult than mining in “classical” relational databases containing only numeric or categorical attributes.
Another important issue in mining medical data is privacy and security; medical data are collected on
patients, misuse of these data or abuse of patients must be prevented.
The goal of the book is to present a wide spectrum of applications of data mining and knowledge
management in medical area.
The book is divided into 3 sections. The rst section entitled “Theoretical Aspects” discusses some
basic notions of data mining and knowledge management with respect to the medical area. This section
presents a theoretical background for the rest of the book.
Chapter I introduces the basic concepts of medical informatics: data, information, and knowledge. It
shows how these concepts are interrelated and how they can be used for decision support in medicine.
All discussed approaches are illustrated on one simple medical example.
Chapter II introduces the basic notions about ontologies, presents a survey of their use in medicine
and explores some related issues: knowledge bases, terminology, and information retrieval. It also ad-
dresses the issues of ontology design, ontology representation, and the possible interaction between data
mining and ontologies.
Health managers and clinicians often need models that try to minimize several types of costs associated
with healthcare, including attribute costs (e.g. the cost of a specic diagnostic test) and misclassication
xxi
costs (e.g. the cost of a false negative test). Chapter III presents some concepts related to cost-sensitive
learning and cost-sensitive classication in medicine and reviews research in this area.
There are a number of machine learning methods used in data mining. Among them, articial neural
networks gain a lot of popularity although the built models are not as understandable as, for example,
decision trees. These networks are presented in two subsequent chapters. Chapter IV describes the theo-
retical background of articial neural networks (architectures, methods of learning) and shows how these
networks can be used in medical domain to solve various classication and regression problems. Chapter
V introduces classication networks composed of preprocessing layers and classication networks and
compares them with “classical” multilayer perceptions on three medical case studies.
The second section, “General Applications,” presents work that is general in the sense of a variety
of biologically interpretable knowledge from gene expression data, over human embryo selection for
the purpose of human in-vitro fertilization treatments, to diagnosis of various diseases based on machine
learning techniques.
Discovery of biologically interpretable knowledge from gene expression data is a crucial issue. Cur-
rent gene data analysis is often based on global approaches such as clustering. An alternative way is
to utilize local pattern mining techniques for global modeling and knowledge discovery. The next two
xxii
chapters deal with this problem from two points of view: using data only, and combining data with do-
main knowledge. Chapter XII proposes three data mining methods to deal with the use of local patterns,
and chapter XIII points out the role of genomic background knowledge in gene expression data mining.
Its application is demonstrated in several tasks such as relational descriptive analysis, constraint-based
knowledge discovery, feature selection, and construction or quantitative association rule mining.
Chapter XIV describes the process used to mine a database containing data related to patient visits
during Tinnitus Retraining Therapy.
Chapter XV describes a new multi-classication system using Gaussian networks to combine the
outputs (probability distributions) of standard machine learning classication algorithms. This multi-
classication technique has been applied to the selection of the most promising embryo-batch for human
in-vitro fertilization treatments.
Chapter XVI reviews current policies of tuberculosis control programs for the diagnosis of tu-
berculosis. A data mining project that uses WHO’s Direct Observation of Therapy data to analyze the
relationship among different variables and the tuberculosis diagnostic category registered for each patient
is then presented.
Chapter XVII describes how to integrate medical knowledge with purely inductive (data-driven)
methods for the creation of clinical prediction rules. The described framework has been applied to the
creation of clinical prediction rules for the diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea.
Chapter XVIII describes goals, current results, and further plans of long time activity concerning
application of data mining and machine learning methods to the complex medical data set. The analyzed
data set concerns longitudinal study of atherosclerosis risk factors.
The book can be used as a textbook of advanced data mining applications in medicine. The book
addresses not only researchers and students in the eld of computer science or medicine but it will be