Clinical decision support system, a potential solution for diagnostic accuracy improvement in oral squamous cell carcinoma: A systematic review

BACKGROUND and AIM: Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is a rapidly progressive disease and despite the progress in the treatment of cancer, remains a life-threatening illness with a poor prognosis. Diagnostic techniques of the oral cavity are not painful, non-invasive, simple and inexpensive methods. Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) are the most important diagnostic technologies used to help health professionals to analyze patients’ data and make decisions. This paper, by studying CDSS applications in the process of providing care for the cancer patients, has looked into the CDSS potentials in OSCC diagnosis. METHODS: We retrieved relevant articles indexed in MEDLINE/PubMed database using high-quality keywords. First, the title and then the abstract of the related articles were reviewed in the step of screening. Only research articles which had designed clinical decision support system in different stages of providing care for the cancer patient were retained in this study according to the input criteria. RESULTS: Various studies have been conducted about the important roles of CDSS in health processes related to different types of cancer. According to the aim of studies, we categorized them into several groups including treatment, diagnosis, risk assessment, screening, and survival estimation. CONCLUSION: Successful experiences in the field of CDSS applications in different types of cancer have indicated that machine learning methods have a high potential to manage the data and diagnostic improvement in OSCC intelligently and accurately.