Subjective Probabilities in Medical Diagnosis

The extensive research on computer-based medical diagnosis has not had much impact on medical practice because of conflicting results and the apparently high cost of operational systems. The heart of these problems appears to be the unavailability of large amounts of easily retrievable actuarial data needed for the probability estimates about symptom-disease relationships. This paper proposes that computer-based medical diagnosis can become an effective and economically feasible tool through the routine use of appropriately obtained physician probability estimates.