A Clinical Decision Support System for Assessing the Risk of Cervical Cancer: Development and Evaluation Study

BACKGROUND: Cervical cancer has been recognized as a preventable type of cancer. As the assessment of all the risk factors of a disease is challenging for physicians, information technology and risk assessment models have been used to estimate the degree of risk. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to develop a clinical decision support system to assess the risk of cervical cancer. METHODS: This study was conducted in 2 phases in 2021. In the first phase of the study, 20 gynecologists completed a questionnaire to determine the essential parameters for assessing the risk of cervical cancer, and the data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. In the second phase of the study, the prototype of the clinical decision support system was developed and evaluated. RESULTS: The findings revealed that the most important parameters for assessing the risk of cervical cancer consisted of general and specific parameters. In total, the 8 parameters that had the greatest impact on the risk of cervical cancer were selected. After developing the clinical decision support system, it was evaluated and the mean values of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were 85.81%, 93.82%, and 91.39%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The clinical decision support system developed in this study can facilitate the process of identifying people who are at risk of developing cervical cancer. In addition, it can help to increase the quality of health care and reduce the costs associated with the treatment of cervical cancer.