A Prototype of a Decision Support System for Equine Cardiovascular Diseases Diagnosis and Management

Abstract

Proper diagnosis and management of equine cardiac diseases require a broad experience and a specialization in the field, but acquisition of specific knowledge is difficult, due, among other reasons, to the limited literature in this field. Therefore, we have designed, developed, and implemented (on a computer algebra system) a Decision Support System (DSS) for equine cardiovascular diseases diagnosis and management based on clinical practise. At this step it is appropriate for equine science teaching, but this work paves the way for a clinical decision support system that facilitated equine clinicians the management of horses with cardiac diseases, allowing improving health care in this species. The latter would require extensive testing prior to its use. The novelty of this work relies on the organization of the equine cardiology workflow in mathematical logic form, that allowed designing, develop and implement a DSS in this new field. An innovation of this work is the part of the DSS devoted to data completion (motivated by the possible lack of specialization of the users—the veterinarians).