Workflow Driven Cognitive Decision Support Systems for Clinicians:: A Case of Intra-Operative Visualization System for RFA.

This paper investigates how the knowledge of clinical workflow or clinical problem solving process can support the development of decision support system and improve the performance of the clinicians. A prototype of a decision support system called Intra-operative Visualization System (IVS) was developed based on a workflow centered design framework. IVS was designed for an upcoming minimally invasive surgery called Radio Frequency Ablation or RFA (for treatment of liver cancer). IVS was evaluated in an experimental study by comparing the performance of eight expert intervention radiologists and eight medical students while performing selected tasks from RFA procedure on the patient phantom by using two systems: IVS and the conventional Ultrasound (US). The results reveal significant evidence for improved decision-making when using the IVS by both the clinical experts and students. This study demonstrates the benefits of workflow centered design in medical visualization to support clinical decision-making and hence improvement of task performance and prevention of errors.