Software to support differentia! diagnosis in internal medicine - Impact on the quality of medicine

摘要

Without doubt, differential diagnosis is the most important and intellectually most challenging task for a physician. The previous expert systems to support it could not establish themselves widely in practice due to the high complexity. Also, it absolutely impossible to operationalize the entire spectrum of medical knowledge. Currently available systems provide the user with a structured list of possible differential diagnoses on the basis of the supplied symptoms. This in combination with attractive and intuitive user interfaces leads to increasing applications. Internal medicine in particular will benefit from the use of such systems on account of the complexity of the symptoms and the huge number of diagnoses. With supportive deployments the speed of diagnostic results can be increases and erroneous diagnoses can be avoided which taken together can help to improve the quality of treatment.