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A Practical Computer Program that Diagnoses Diseases in Actu

Google Tech Talk April 23, 2009 ABSTRACT A Practical Computer Program that Diagnoses Diseases in Actual Patients, presented by Carlos Feder. Several so called "computer medical diagnosis programs" have been devised. We had a chance to review Internist, Quick Medical Reference (QMR), DXplain, Iliad, Gideon, Isabel, and others; some are no longer available. All this systems evoke a typically long differential diagnosis list, based on patient's symptoms, providing an excellent reminder of unusual diagnoses; however, they are unable to pinpoint the actual disease or diseases that indeed afflict a specific patient. Consequently, they are considered rather teaching or training tools for medical students or inexperienced physicians, as admitted by some of the program authors; for this reason and being quite time consuming to consult, these programs are poorly accepted and used by practicing health care providers. Our novel diagnostic system overcomes the drawbacks of existing programs, emulating as close as possible the natural reasoning of human clinicians. The core of our system is the novel mini-max procedure that computes the probability of each potential diagnosis more accurately than Bayes formula, Bayesian networks, and other similar methods; the system also diagnoses concurrent diseases that simultaneously afflict a single patient. Mini-max procedure enables to determine probabilistically and recommend at each diagnostic step the best cost-benefit clinical data next to ...