Decision support for pediatric TBI: is a CT-scan indicated?

Kuppermann et al. published a large study in The Lancet (2009) titled “Identification of children at very low risk of clinically-important brain injuries after head trauma: a prospective cohort study”. As the authors say: “CT imaging of head-injured children has risks of radiation-induced malignancy. Our aim was to identify children at very low risk of clinically-important traumatic brain injuries (ciTBI) for whom CT might be unnecessary.”

This lead to a nice flowchart on when to make a CT, and when not. For copyright reasons I did not include the original flowchart in this blog post, but as I wanted to use it for a decision supporting system in NeuroMind 2, I created a decision tree with OmniGraffle to use as the basis for the app’s content.

(click for full size version)

Then I continued development using the new Titanium Studio IDE, based on the tests I have posted previously. Of course some further code modifications were necessary, but in the end the result was very satisfying. The screenshots below show what it looks like:

Developing for decision support is going well, as you see. For now I am focusing on iPhone optimization, as soon as I have some working “real life” examples I intend to expand the focus to iPad and Android.