Abstract
After reading this chapter, you should know the answers to these questions:
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How is the concept of probability useful for understanding test results and for making medical decisions that involve uncertainty?
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How can we characterize the ability of a test to discriminate between disease and health?
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What information do we need to interpret test results accurately?
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What is expected-value decision making? How can this methodology help us to understand particular medical problems?
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What are utilities, and how can we use them to represent patients’ preferences?
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What is a sensitivity analysis? How can we use it to examine the robustness of a decision and to identify the important variables in a decision?
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What are influence diagrams? How do they differ from decision trees?
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Suggested Readings
Gold M.R., Siegel J.E., Russell L.B., Weinstein M.C. (1996). Cost Effectiveness in Health and Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hunink M., Glasziou P., Siegel J., Weeks J., Pliskin J., Einstein A., Weinstein M. (2001). Decision Making in Health and Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nease R.F. Jr., Owens D.K. (1997). Use of influence diagrams to structure medical decisions. Medical Decision Making, 17(13):263–275.
Owens D.K., Schacter R.D., Nease R.F. Jr. (1997). Representation and analysis of medical decision problems with influence diagrams. Medical Decision Making, 17(3):241–262.
Raiffa H. (1970). Decision Analysis: Introductory Lectures on Choices Under Uncertainty. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Sox H.C. (1986). Probability theory in the use of diagnostic tests. Annals of Internal Medicine, 104(1):60–66.
Sox H.C., Blatt M.A., Higgins M.C., Marton K.I. (1988). Medical Decision Making. Boston, MA: Butterworths.
Tversky A., Kahneman D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185:1124.
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Owens, D.K., Sox, H.C. (2006). Biomedical Decision Making: Probabilistic Clinical Reasoning. In: Shortliffe, E.H., Cimino, J.J. (eds) Biomedical Informatics. Health Informatics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-36278-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-36278-9_3
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