Highlighting the rules between diagnosis types and laboratory diagnostic tests for patients of an emergency department: Use of association rule mining

Diagnostic tests are widely used in emergency departments to make detailed investigations on diagnosis and treat patients correctly. However, since these tests are expensive and time-consuming, ordering correct tests for patients is crucial for efficient use of hospital resources. Thus, understanding the relation between diagnosis and diagnostic test requirement becomes an important issue in emergency departments. Association rule mining was used to extract hidden patterns and relation between diagnosis and diagnostic test requirement in real-life medical data received from an emergency department. Apriori was used as an association rule mining algorithm. Diagnosis was grouped into 21 categories based on International Classification of Disease, and laboratory tests were grouped into four main categories (hemogram, biochemistry, cardiac enzyme, urine and human excrement related). Both positive and negative rules were discovered. Since the nature of the data had the dominance of negative values, higher number of negative rules with higher confidences were discovered compared to positive ones. The extracted rules were validated by emergency department experts and practitioners. It was concluded that understanding the association between patient's diagnosis and diagnostic test requirement can improve decision-making and efficient use of resources in emergency departments. Association rules can also be used for supporting physicians to treat patients.