Computer Diagnosis and Diagnostic Methods
Alvan R. Feinstein · JAMA · 1973
This book contains the proceedings of a second conference at the University of Michigan on the "Diagnostic Process." If the published papers accurately reflect the realities of the ten years that have elapsed since the first conference, medical diagnosis appears to be evolving into an act of mathematical rather than clinical logic. The prototypic diagnostician in this new form of reasoning is Thomas Bayes (1702-1761), a Presbyterian minister whose posthumously discovered theorem about the relationship ofa prioriandpost prioriprobabilities was a dominant theme of the conference. An array of Bayesian conditional probabilities, expressed in symbols such as "P(D/S)," appears in most of the 19 chapters in the text. A few of the authors, not wholly faithful to Bayesian diagnostic methods, suggest such mathematical alternatives as distance function indices, multivariate matrices, likelihood ratios, clustering algorithms, and discriminant function analysis. Among the infidels, surprisingly, are R. S. Ledley and