My Journey Through the Field of Medical Informatics

In this contribution some achievements and milestones in the field of medical informatics, especially concerning decision support, as perceived by the author, are presented. The author focuses on those topics with respect to decision support that during his career in medical informatics impressed him and triggered him to convince his PhD students to start research on related topics. Both some of these achievements and the related research of some of his PhD students will be presented. The contribution starts with signal classification. Both ECG classification and sleep EEG classification are discussed. Then the use of Bayes' theorem for diagnostic purposes is discussed and some early applications pass review, among which the AAPHelp system developed by de Dombal and colleagues. Attention is subsequently paid to the advent of expert systems and other knowledge-based systems such as MYCIN and INTERNIST and to guideline-based decision support systems. Finally, the author presents his ideas about challenges for the field.