A systems approach to medical decision aiding

Disease diagnosis, therapeutic interventions and epidemiology involve increasingly complex information processing and decision-making schemes. The principle conceptual obstacles encountered by these efforts are briefly discussed and the framework of an approach is outlined that effectively overcomes them. In clinical practice the traditional schemes are phenomenologically based. In medical research extensive use of sophisticated mathematically-based model is made. The author outlines an approach that combines these schemes in a system architecture that offers powerful computer-based decision-making aids