A visual active learning system for the assessment of patient well-being in prostate cancer research

The assessment of patient well-being is highly relevant for the early detection of diseases, for assessing the risks of therapies, or for evaluating therapy outcomes. The knowledge to assess a patient's well-being is actually tacit knowledge and thus, can only be used by the physicians themselves. The rationale of this research approach is to use visual interfaces to capture the mental models of experts and make them available more explicitly. We present a visual active learning system that enables physicians to label the well-being state of patient histories suffering prostate cancer. The labeled instances are iteratively learned in an active learning approach. In addition, the system provides models and visual interfaces for a) estimating the number of patients needed for learning, b) suggesting meaningful learning candidates and c) visual feedback on test candidates. We present the results of two evaluation strategies that prove the validity of the applied model. In a representative real-world use case, we learned the feedback of physicians on a data collection of more than 16.000 prostate cancer histories.