Clinical Decision Making

Courses: 6.872J, 6.873J, HST.947

John Guttag
Tomas Lozano-Perez
Roger Mark
Peter Szolovits
George Verghese

Medical practice has traditionally employed a combination of scientific modeling and the healing arts. The goal of our activities in clinical decision making is to better understand diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic reasoning and to develop engineering models that detect and prevent errors, suggest better decisions, educate patients and providers, and smooth the flow of information useful in health care. This leads to projects spanning a rich and diverse set of technical and applied aims, including real-time tracking of patients and their medical status, improved methods of representing and reasoning with clinical knowledge and data, and exploiting the relationship between clinical data and genomic and proteomic data to explicate the mechanisms of disease and to improve its treatment.