A bi-level belief rule based decision support system for diagnosis of lymph node metastasis in gastric cancer

Lymph Node Metastasis (LNM) in gastric cancer is an important prognostic factor regarding long-term survival. As it is difficult for doctors to combine multiple factors for a comprehensive analysis, Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) is desired to help the analysis. In this paper, a novel Bi-level Belief Rule Based (BBRB) prototype CDSS is proposed. The CDSS consists of a two-layer Belief Rule Base (BRB) system. It can be used to handle uncertainty in both clinical data and specific domain knowledge. Initial BRBs are constructed by domain specific knowledge, which may not be accurate. Traditional methods for optimizing BRB are sensitive to initialization and are limited by their weak local searching abilities. In this paper, a new Clonal Selection Algorithm (CSA) is proposed to train a BRB system. Based on CSA, efficient global search can be achieved by reproducing individuals and selecting their improved maturated progenies after the affinity maturation process. The proposed prototype CDSS is validated using a set of real patient data and performs extremely well. In particular, BBRB is capable of providing more reliable and informative diagnosis than a single-layer BRB system in the case study. Compared with conventional optimization method, the new CSA could improve the diagnostic performance further by trying to avoid immature convergence to local optima.