Methods: A national sample of 67 internists, 35 family physicians, and 6 other physicians used the Quick Medical Reference (QMR) diagnostic decision support system to assist them in the diagnosis of written clinical cases. Three sets of eight cases, stratified by diagnostic difficulty and the potential of QMR to produce high-quality information, were used. The effects of using QMR on three meas...

In order to cope with the complexity of today’s digital systems in diagnostic modeling, hierarchical multi-level approaches should be used. In this chapter, the possibilities of using Decision Diagrams (DD) for uniform diagnostic modeling of digital systems at different levels of abstraction are discussed. DDs can be used for modeling the functions and faults of systems at logic, register trans...

Screening mammography is the most effective means for early detection of breast cancer. Although general rules for discriminating malignant and benign lesions exist, radiologists are unable to perfectly detect and classify all lesions as malignant and benign, for many reasons which include, but are not limited to, overlap of features that distinguish malignancy, difficulty in estimating disease...

Many agricultural decision problems can be treated within the framework of diagnostic testing. Observations are made sequentially in to order to classify a production unit as normal/unnormal, diseased/healthy etc. The decision problem is to find the optimal classification depending on the observations. The framework is well established and optimal use of such diagnostic testing schemes require ...

A major amount of our time working in clinical practice involves thinking and decision making. Perhaps it is because decision making is such a commonplace activity that it is assumed we can all make effective decisions. However, this is not the case and the example of diagnostic error supports this assertion. Until quite recently there has been a general nihilism about the ability to change the...

Introductio Research on diagnosdtc ecision support systems (DDSS) has tended to focus on the ability ofthe DDSS to analyze complex clinical cases without knowing to what extent such case analyses and other advanced system features are actually used by physicians in practice. We conducted an international mail survey of the users of QMRTm, a well-known DDSS, to determine which functions physicia...

The task of a Diagnostic Decision Support System (DDSS) is to deduce the health status of a physical system. In this paper, a multi-formalism framework to generate DDSS software based on formal descriptions of the application domain and the diagnostic computations is proposed. The key idea is to describe systems and related data with a domain ontology, and to describe diagnostic computations wi...

A self-signaling action is an action chosen partly to secure good news about one’s traits or abilities, even when the action has no causal impact on these traits and abilities. We discuss some of the odd things that happen when self-signaling is introduced into an otherwise rational conception of action. We employ a signaling game perspective in which the diagnostic signals are an endogenous pa...

PSA has led to a drastic increase in the detection of prostate cancer, rendering this biomarker the gateway for the diagnostic pathway of prostatic neoplasms. However, the increase in incidence has not been mirrored by a similar reduction in mortality. Widespread PSA testing has facilitated the overdiagnosis and overtreatment of indolent disease. To reduce this phenomenon and avoid negative rep...