Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
21
Medical Decision Making as a Group Choice Process:
Consensual Dynamics in Fuzzy Diagnosis
Silvia Bortot and Mario Fedrizzi
21.1
Introduction
When addressing a medical decision making process, experts from different med-
ical fields share information and knowledge to find a consensus, i.e. a common
diagnosis and a common therapeutic decision. Diagnosis by a group consensus
needs a wide range of organizational and technological support and therefore is
very challenging to be developed. It's well known that the improvement of com-
puter technology in the last twenty years made possible the implementation of the
so called Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS). As pointed out in DeSanctis
and Gallupe [8], a GDSS combines communication, computing and decision sup-
port technologies to facilitate formulation and solution of unstructured problems by
a group of people. Accordingly, GDSS are very useful when teams of medical ex-
perts are involved in decision processes aiming at transforming medical evidence
collected from a patient into a diagnosis. The development of a GDSS architec-
ture to support collaborative medical decision making should cover several issues
related to medical reasoning like data representation features, clinical algorithms,
hypermedia techniques, cognitive models, communication tools, and so on. The
reader interested in the development of a GDSS supporting the collaborative work
conducted by a multidisciplinary medical team, based on cognitive processes in-
corporating clinical reasoning and problem solving features can refer to [24]. The
authors introduce an hypermedia-based GDSS architecture to support collaborative
medical decision making, showing the applicability of various models, techniques
and reasoning methods at different levels of medical support to assist group mem-
bers adaptation to a wide spectrum of problem solving patterns.
Since the diagnostic work is carried on through collaboration and information
sharing among specialists, i.e. data presentation, analysis and interpretation are ne-
gotiated interactively and awareness of the outcome is shared by all of the team
[20], one of the key issues to address is how to model consensual dynamics. Since
the notion of consensus combines many significant aspects of preference modeling
in group decisions, it plays a an important role when the social choice scheme is
