Prognostic methods in medicine

Prognosis--the prediction of the course and outcome of disease processes--plays an important role in patient management tasks like diagnosis and treatment planning. As a result, prognostic models form an integral part of a number of systems supporting these tasks. Furthermore, prognostic models constitute instruments to evaluate the quality of health care and the consequences of health care policies by comparing predictions according to care norms with actual results. Approaches to developing prognostic models vary from using traditional probabilistic techniques, originating from the field of statistics, to more qualitative and model-based techniques, originating from the field of artificial intelligence (AI). In this paper, various approaches to constructing prognostic models, with emphasis on methods from the field of AI, are described and compared.