Strategy evaluation in patients with sustained ventricular tachycardia and fibrillation by decision network analysis

The authors describe the evaluation of a computer assisted management system to support protocol guided treatment of patients suffering from life threatening ventricular arrhythmias. The system advises and keeps track of all relevant information. The setup of the system is flexible so that derivations from the protocol and enhancements of the stored knowledge can be realized with modest effort. The management system uses FoxPro as database management system, runs under MS-DOS, and communicates with the central departmental database computer by means of PC-NFS through remote shell facilities. The programs for the central database are written in FORTRAN 77. The system runs under the AIX operating system on an IBM RS6000.<>