Benchmark of Approaches to Sequential Diagnosis

Abstract

Multiple diagnoses of the patient’s state based on results of successive examinations is one of the most frequent and typical medical diagnosing tasks. Such a task, henceforth called the sequential diagnosis, involves dealing with a complex decision problem. This is caused by the dependence of the patient’s state at a given time on the preceding states and on the already applied treatment. Although there remains no doubt as to the very existence of this dependence, it may be of a diversified nature and range; its simplest instance can be a one-instantbackwards dependence to so complex arrangements as those in which the current state depends on the whole former course of the disease.