Decision-Tree-Based Approach for Pressure Ulcer Risk Assessment in Immobilized Patients

Abstract

Applications where data mining tools are used in the fields of medicine and nursing are becoming more and more frequent. Among them, decision trees have been applied to different health data, such as those associated with pressure ulcers. Pressure ulcers represent a health problem with a significant impact on the morbidity and mortality of immobilized patients and on the quality of life of affected people and their families. Nurses provide comprehensive care to immobilized patients. This fact results in an increased workload that can be a risk factor for the development of serious health problems. Healthcare work with evidence-based practice with an objective criterion for a nursing professional is an essential addition for the application of preventive measures. In this work, two ways for conducting a pressure ulcer risk assessment based on a decision tree approach are provided. The first way is based on the activity and mobility characteristics of the Braden scale, whilst the second way is based on the activity, mobility and skin moisture characteristics. The results provided in this study endow nursing professionals with a foundation in relation to the use of their experience and objective criteria for quick decision making regarding the risk of a patient to develop a pressure ulcer.

Bibliometric Analysis of Development Trends and Research Hotspots in the Study of Data Mining in Nursing Based on CiteSpace

“… 65 , 66 Decision trees can be used to build predictive evaluation models to support clinical decision-making, thereby reducing medical costs and saving medical resources. 67 , 68 …”

Personalized statistical medicine

“…Decision trees : This approach has been recently forwarded for pressure ulcer risk assessment in immobilized patients 20 and breast cancer diagnosis 21 . These trees combine probabilities of different outcomes and the clinician’s value judgement at successive decision nodes to progressively assess the likelihood of various outcomes.…”

Differentiating Pressure Ulcer Risk Levels through Interpretable Classification Models Based on Readily Measurable Indicators

“…They tend to heal slowly, and, if left untreated, they can progressively damage deep tissues (including muscles and bones), making them a significant health problem. The impact of PUs extends beyond patients, affecting their families and overloading the resources of the healthcare and socio-health systems [3,4]. Because of this, PUs are considered to be adverse outcomes in clinical practice and need to be avoided.…”

“…The main aim of this paper is to propose interpretable prediction models that assist nursing professionals to estimate the risk level of PUs in each patient. For this purpose, data from 16,215 patients in Granada (Spain) have been collected, focusing mainly on indicators that are quickly identifiable in practice by nursing professionals, such as mobility, activity, and skin humidity [4]. The data present a common problem in nursing classification datasets, such as the presence of class imbalance [26].…”