A method and system for medical analytics implemented on a computer and
designed to aid a medical professional in diagnosing one or more diseases
afflicting a patient. In contrast to prior art, the present method is
based on using clinical data (m) that excludes subjective qualities of
and also excludes prevalence of the one or more diseases (i). The method
uses a knowledge base that contains disease (i) models exhibiting
clinical data (m). Clinical data present (j) in the patient are input
into the computer. Then, clinical data present (j) are matched with
clinical data (m) in the knowledge base to enable the computer to compose
a differential diagnosis list of ruled in diagnoses (k), where k=1 . . .
n, for each of the disease (i) models that exhibits at least one clinical
datum (m) that matches at least one clinical datum present (j) in the
patient. In a key step, the computer computes a probability P(k) for each
of the ruled in diagnoses (k) with the aid of a mini-max procedure that
overcomes prior art limitations of the Bayes formulation and permits the
analytics method to consider concurrent and competing diagnoses (k).
Furthermore, the method composes pairs of clinical data present (j) and
absent (r) in the patient to aid the medical professional in evaluating
diagnoses and determining the most cost-effective clinical data to
collect for conducting an effective and rapid diagnostic quest.