The development of clinically useful molecular diagnostics requires validation of clinical assay performance and achievement of clinical qualification in clinical trials. As discussed elsewhere in this Focus section on molecular diagnostics, validation of assay performance must be rigorous, especially when the assay will be used to guide treatment decisions. Here we review some of the problems ...

Healthcare providers are facing an enormous cost pressure and a scarcity of resources, so that they need to realign in the tension between economic efficiency and demand-oriented healthcare. Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) and clinical pathways have been established to improve the quality of care and to reduce costs at the same time. CPGs have a positive impact on the health outcome. Howeve...

Specific features of decision support systems in ultrasound di-agnostics are considered, compared with decision support systems in other domains. Main characteristics of the system SonaRes are brought out.

Knowledge representation has always been a major problem in the design of medical decision support systems. In this paper we present a new methodology to represent and reason about medical knowledge, based on the declarative specification of interval constraints over the medical concepts. This allows the integration of deep medical models involving differential equations developed in biomedical...

This paper provides a literature review in clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) with a focus on the way knowledge bases are constructed, and how inference mechanisms and group decision making methods are used in CDSSs. Particular attention is paid to the uncertainty handling capability of the commonly used knowledge representation and inference schemes. The definition of what constitute go...

The detection of treatment conflicts between multiple treatment protocols that are co-incident is a difficult and open problem that is particularly exacerbated regarding the treatment of multiple medical conditions co-occurring in aged patients. For example, a clinical protocol for prostate cancer treatment requires the administration of androgen-suppressing medication, which may negatively int...

This paper presents an environment for collecting clinical data using structured speech input. The system uses nomenclature terms and data consistency rules to limit speech input to a discrete set of phrases which can be configured to support a wide range of studies. This information is stored in an eventoriented data model as strongly typed observations for subsequent distribution and data ana...