Expert Systems and Decision Support in Medicine

The 33rd Annual Meeting of the German Association for Medical Documentation, Informatics and Statistics was combined with a Special Topic Conference of the European Federation for Medical Informatics and takes place at Hannover, F. R. of Germany, from September 26 to 29, 1988. It was planned and initililly prepared by the late Prof. P. L Reichertz, who headed the Hannover institute from 1969 to 1987. To commemorate his contribution to the development of medicine the conference was devoted to him "Peter Reichertz Memorial Conference on Expert Systems and Decision Support in Medicine" Since computers in the early Fifties were first applied to support medical reasoning, various phases of euphoria and resi~ation have . followed. Every new methodology which became technically possible was and will be applied to the old questlon of how to diagnose diseases more reliably. Artificial Intelligence is just one new approach to the old challenge. Over the years some· authors have been very optimistic and put forward opinions which motivated the common press to coin the phrase 'Dr. med. computer'. Papers printed under this heading rebuffed the majority of physiCians for many years. Today we know that medical decision making is a most complex buman performance. And 30 years of research on decision support have given us only limited insight into the underlying processes. Most of the principal methodological questions were already asked very early on.