Clinical decision analysis using microcomputers. A case of coexistent hepatocellular carcinoma and abdominal aortic aneurysm.

Many difficult medical decisions involve uncertainty. Decision analysis-an explicit, normative and analytic approach to making decisions under uncertainty-provides a probabilistic framework for exploring difficult problems in nondeterministic domains. As the methodology has advanced, clinical decision analysis has been applied to increasingly complex medical problems and disseminated widely in the medical literature. Unfortunately, this approach imposes a heavy computational burden on analysts. Microcomputer-based decision-support software can ease this burden.