Clinical (or Diagnostic) Decision Support Systems (CDSS) are interactive computer programs, which directly assist physicians and other health professionals with decision making tasks.

For medical diagnosis, there are scopes for ambiguities in inputs, like, history (patient’s description of the diseased condition), physical examinations (especially in cases of uncooperative or less intelligent patients), laboratory tests (faulty methods or equipment). See drugs, medication, and pharmacology for substances that are used to treat patients. ... Diagnosis (from the Greek words dia = by and gnosis = knowledge) is the process of identifying a disease by its signs, symptoms and results of various diagnostic procedures. ...

Moreover, for treatment, there are chances of drug reactions and specific allergies, and patients non-compliance of the therapy due to cost or time or adverse reactions. Look up Therapy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Therapy (in Greek: θεραπεία) or treatment is the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a diagnosis. ...

In all these areas, computers can be of immense help in facilitating the clinician to reach an accurate diagnosis faster. Another new branch of medicine pharmacogenomics is the product of breeding between information technology and biology, leading to individualized treatment. A drawing of the everyday computer. ... Pharmacogenomics is the branch of pharmaceutics which deals with the influence of genetic variation on drug response in patients by correlating gene expression or single-nucleotide polymorphisms with a drugs efficacy or toxicity. ... Category: ... Main articles: Life The most salient example of biological universality is that all living things share a common carbon-based biochemistry and in particular pass on their characteristics via genetic material, which is based on nucleic acids such as DNA and which uses a common genetic code with only minor...

The basic components of a CDSS include a dynamic (medical) knowledge base and an inferencing mechanism (usually a set of rules derived from the experts and evidence-based medicine). It could be based on Expert systems or artificial neural networks or both (Connectionist expert systems) An expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of knowledge, technique, or skill whose judgment is accorded authority and status by the public or their peers. ... Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is a medical movement based upon the application of the scientific method to medical practice, recognizing that many long-established medical traditions are not yet subjected to adequate scientific scrutiny. ... An expert system is a class of computer programs developed by researchers in artificial intelligence during the 1970s and applied commercially throughout the 1980s. ... A neural network is an interconnected group of neurons. ... Connectionist Expert Systems are artificial neural network (ANN) based expert systems where the ANN generates inferencing rules e. ...

External links

• OpenClinical maintains an extensive archive of Artificial Intelligence systems in routine clinical use.
• Some useful links
• Prerequisites
• A chapter of a book
• Another book chapter
• A slide show
• A systematic review
• Improving Outcomes with Clinical Decision Support: An Implementer’s Guide is a new resource designed to help healthcare organizations use clinical decision support (CDS) to measurably improve key healthcare outcomes such as the quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness of care delivery.

Computer-based medical decision support system: [1]