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.