DESSA: a new decision support system for neurosurgery.

DESSA is a new decision support system that addresses an open multidisciplinary group of medical care providers (users) working in the area of epilepsy. DESSA is the result of a close collaboration between engineers, medical doctors, and market analysts. Its architecture provides the user with an integrated electronic working domain handling diverse types of information and medical records. DESSA enables the user to make a decision based on the identification of critical interaction factors amongst predefined data categories through a correlations model on the integrated clinical picture of the patient in real time. The term integrated clinical picture refers to the ability of the system to record, describe, and classify in time the epileptic events on the basis of their type, frequency of occurrence, duration of symptoms, and correlate with respective pharmacological treatment and period of its application as well as respective specialized EEG and vEEG pictures.