Week 10/3-10/5

Content:
The lectures by Dr. Greenes were as very informative . In the first class I learned about the statistical approach of decision making using decision models. The decision model he majorly talked about was Decision tree.The objective for decision analysis using decision models is based on framework where the initial step to try to diagnose the problem and thinking of all possible alternatives. Following this we try to predict the possible consequences of the alternatives taken and then based on the preference we try to make the best choice. The decision model he majorly talked about was  using Decision tree.The probabalistic approach  that was used by Dr. Greenes in the example where we try to find the best choice for the treatment of abdominal pain helped to understand the implications of decision making in real world.
I believe  second lecture was sort of revision of the topics which were discussed by Dr. Shortliffe in his BMI 501 lecture, where the terms like senstivity, specificity, prevalance etc were defined. It actually helped me a lot when Dr. Greenes discussed about using Bayseian theorem to calculate posterior probability and also  prior probability.I also learned new terms like Quality adjusted life years and Declining exponential Approximation of life expectancy and how they could be used for decision analysis tasks.
The other important thing that I learned about is that decision analysis not only revolves around the best clincal treatment but it also encompasses factors of benifits ,the quality of life ,financial and  economic costs and other factors which could have the influemce on the final outcome.
The seminar given by Dr. Fram was really a good one. He mentioned some cutting points that sometimes even producing the high quality data like images of CTs and MRI are not very helpful in solving the  problem but the visual perception also plays a very important role in it, as he showed in one of the examples where physicians fail to regognise a missing bone in a X ray generated image. He presented some amazing facts about human visual perception that we would never ideally. He also demeonstrated that how playing video games increased the the visual perception of  physicians and how they made less errors performing leproscopic surgeries. I all the week was really fun.   

Posted by
Ashutosh Singraur