title: A decision class analysis of critical care life-support decision-making.
abstract: Decision analysis is a powerful methodology that can help clinicians make good decisions. Because it is not practical to place a decision analyst at the bedside in critical care units, the application of this methodology will require leveraging the analyst through computer-based systems. A decision class analysis is a collective analysis of a group of decisions that provides the high-level specification for such a computer system. This paper presents a decision class analysis of critical care life-support decisions. Key elements of this analysis are: the simplification of an otherwise extremely complex multistage sequential decision problem by using a sequence of two-stage models, and the use of six generic knowledge maps that capture the extremely complex relevant medical knowledge.
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery, Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, CA.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Seiver
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003422:Critical Care; D003658:Decision Making, Computer-Assisted; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D008020:Life Support Care