TakeHeart II: A tool to support clinical cardiovascular risk assessment

Bayesian networks are powerful reasoning engines for decision support systems, due to their accomodation for a wide range of queries, and clear presentation of independence assumptions. However, their practical use hinges on an accessible presentation of the knowledge they represent: a user should be exposed to only the functionality they need to get their job done. We desired to build a software tool which generates easy to use domain-specific graphical user interfaces based on pre-existing Bayesian networks. We demonstrate the tool with TakeHeart II, a decision support system for assessing heart attack risk.