A cooperative belief rule based decision support system for lymph node metastasis diagnosis in gastric cancer

Lymph Node Metastasis (LNM) has become one of the most important prognostic factors regarding long-term survival in gastric cancer. As it is difficult for doctors to integrate multiple factors for a comprehensive analysis, Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) is used to help the analysis. In this paper, a new Cooperative Belief Rule Based (CBRB) prototype CDSS is proposed. CBRB consists of two independent Belief Rule Base (BRB) systems and the final output is combined by the Evidential Reasoning (ER) approach. A corresponding new Cooperative CoEvolutionary Algorithm (CCEA) is proposed to train the proposed CBRB model that is nonlinear. A case study demonstrates that the proposed CDSS prototype can obtain the better performance than other CDSS.