A Mathematical Description of Physician Decision Making

This paper presents a mathematical model describing how the physicians actually make a diagnostic decision. Next to a description of diagnostic decision making as done by the physicians, this paper shows that how can we design and develop a new approach to medical diagnosis based on the human principles of decision making. The model was challenged to diagnose a series of actual patients. Real clinical data was entered into the model and the system produced a ranked list of possible diagnoses for each case. The results indicated good performance when compared with internist´s diagnosis. The proposed method is effective and can be applied to describe medical reasoning as done by the physicians.