Future prospects in medical diagnostics

Medical diagnostics is in the process of redefining its position in everyday medical practice. In future the focus will no longer be merely on measuring pathological parameters in the body but also on their interpretation and their use in the production of guideline-based recommendations for doctors and patients. Interpretations of this kind and 'decision support systems' rely on complex statistical disease models which match individual patients' data with existing evidence-based epidemiological and therapeutic knowledge. The first systems are already available and studies show that in practice they are well accepted by physicians. The following article gives an overview of possible future developments in this field.