Promedas: a decision support system for medical diagnosis

[Bert Kappen]

Dear all, we recently completed a report describing the state-of-the-art of
our ongoing efforts in medical diagnosis, the Promedas project.

"PROMEDAS": a probabilistic decision support system for medical diagnosis

The objective of our project is to build a large bayesian
network for diagnosis in internal medicine. As is well-known, this
is not easy and requires the combined efforts of experts in internal
medicine as well as advanced software and algorithmic development.
On the medical side, one of the distinguishing features of our work
is that we have the financial resources to contract physicians to do
the medical modeling and evaluation in a clinical setting. In our
view, this is critical to 1) obtain valid models and 2) to get
accepted by potential users.
On the algoritmic side, our research group in Nijmegen has experience
on approximate inference techniques that are needed to
keep computation tractable. We have developed our own graphical model
software, called BayesBuilder, which is freely available for
non-commercial use.

The maturity of our work can be described as 'close to clinical practice'.
We have just started the first clinical trials to evaluate the acceptance of
a module on lipids and vascular diseases (approx 500 variables)
by the intended users, i.e. experts in internal medicine working in
a hospital environment.

The report can be downloaded from
http://www.snn.kun.nl/~bert/#diagnosis


Bert Kappen             SNN           University of Nijmegen
tel: +31 24 3614241                      fax: +31 24 3541435
URL: www.snn.kun.nl/~bert