Decision support systems for medical diagnosis

Basically, the medical diagnosis process can be interpreted as a decision making process, during which the physician induces the diagnosis of a new and unknown case from an available set of clinical data and from his/her clinical experience. This process can be computerized in order to present medical diagnostic procedures in a rational, objective, accurate and fast way. In fact, in the last two-three decades diagnostic decision support systems have become a well established component of medical technology. In this talk, we address our attention to cancer early detection on the basis of small amount of clinical information. In order to develop a decision support system in this specific context, we emphasized the powerful efficiency and effectiveness of Mathematical Programming approaches as basic tools for developing medical diagnostic decision support systems.