Robert U. Ashford

J Navrro, C Wagner, Uwe Aickelin et al.

Quality of life assessment represents a key process of deciding treatment success and viability. As such, patients' perceptions of their functional status and well-being are important inputs for impairment assessment. Given that patient completed questionnaires are often used to assess patient status and determine future treatment options, it is important to know the level of agreement of the words used by patients and different groups of medical professionals. In this paper, we propose a measure called the Agreement Ratio which provides a ratio of overall agreement when modelling words through Fuzzy Sets (FSs). The measure has been specifically designed for assessing this agreement in fuzzy sets which are generated from data such as patient responses. The measure relies on using the Jaccard Similarity Measure for comparing the different levels of agreement in the FSs generated.

Javier Navarro, Christian Wagner, Uwe Aickelin et al.

In the context of cancer treatment and surgery, quality of life assessment is a crucial part of determining treatment success and viability. In order to assess it, patients completed questionnaires which employ words to capture aspects of patients well-being are the norm. As the results of these questionnaires are often used to assess patient progress and to determine future treatment options, it is important to establish that the words used are interpreted in the same way by both patients and medical professionals. In this paper, we capture and model patients perceptions and associated uncertainty about the words used to describe the level of their physical function used in the highly common (in Sarcoma Services) Toronto Extremity Salvage Score (TESS) questionnaire. The paper provides detail about the interval-valued data capture as well as the subsequent modelling of the data using fuzzy sets. Based on an initial sample of participants, we use Jaccard similarity on the resulting words models to show that there may be considerable differences in the interpretation of commonly used questionnaire terms, thus presenting a very real risk of miscommunication between patients and medical professionals as well as within the group of medical professionals.