A Knowledge Discovery Platform for patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

The etiopathology of IBD still remains unknown. The combined use of lifestyle surveys associated with blood samples and relevant clinical registers seems the best methodology to identify possible links between genetic predisposition, disease occurrence and natural course of the disease. Such a system will help understand the natural course of the disease, study the predisposing factors and related genes and determine early clinical, genetic and immunological predictors of outcome and response to treatment. We build an efficient personalized web-based platform, in order to manage medical data, using efficient data mining and knowledge extraction techniques. Various variables already defined, determined for which associations are searched within the recorded datasets, discover interesting interrelations and extract new knowledge from multiple and heterogeneous archived data that reflect everyday lifestyle and medical information, examine the results of previous therapeutic regimens and obtain quantitative explanations of the observations and generate efficient reports with intelligent data visualization. Our proposed clinical DSS platform incorporates a Data Repository and a Knowledge Discovery module. The platform will provide tracking, data query, report generation, process management functions, data handling as well as statistics, data mining and knowledge extraction capabilities. Medical data from 652 old patients have already been digitized, while blood sampling (plus genetic and serological study) has already been achieved in 295 new patients and 243 healthy volunteers. Several knowledge discovery techniques have been applied already, giving more than satisfactory results. Building such a system, for the first time in Greece, will contribute even more to IBD knowledge and research, as the proposed system will create a unique multidisciplinary combined database with combination of clinical, environmental and laboratory data in IBD. In addition, as IBD is regarded to be a multifactorial disease, we hope to better define some factors that clearly predispose to certain IBD phenotypes and IBD disease course.