The Science of Medical Decision-Making: Principles, Algorithms, and Practice

Medical decision-making is about making choices – choices for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease. But medical decision-making must be made in the context of uncertainty about the course of a disease in an individual patient and the likely benefit or outcome of various treatment options, so making choices is not always easy. This book, aimed at all practising doctors, explores how we make decisions in medical and surgical practice (in probabilistic terms - the probability of success and failure, and how success and failure might be defined) and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, based on algorithmic decision making, might support and facilitate how doctors make decisions. Doctors need to have a basic understanding of the underlying theory and methods of AI in order to understand the benefits and risks of AI diagnostic and decision-making tools in medical and surgical practice. Our aim is to give the reader a sound knowledge of how humans make decisions so that they can better understand the advantages and limitations of the AI tools they will be using in the future.