The papers gathered in this volume were presented at the medical sessions of the First Conference on Mathematics at the Service of Man held in Barcelona, Spain, July 11-16, 1977. Papers presented at the medical sessions were more numerous than those pre sented in any other single area of specialization covered in the conference. Because pf this, the Publications Committee resolved that papers presented at medical sessions be published separately from the proceedings of the conference. The proceedings of the conference have been published by the Esco1a Tecnica Superior d'Arquitectura de 1a...

In the autumn of 1980, the decision was made by the responsible bodies of the German Society for Medical Documentation, Informatics and Statistics (Deutsche Gesellschaft fUr Medlzinische Dokumentation, Informatik und Statistik e.V.) to make the application of computers in blood banking and blood transfusion one of the topics to be treated at the 8th spring conference of this Society, which was then arranged to take place in TUbingen from April 9-11, 1981. The goal of the con- ference was to unite application specialists and methodologists in order to assess current achievements and identify...

In diagnostic medicine a large part of information about the patient is drawn from data, which, more or less, are represented in an opti- calor pictorial form. There is a very wide range of such data as e.g. the patients appearance, the various kinds of radiological images, or cytological imagery. In conventional diagnostics the data, as it comes from the acquisition device, is perceived by the physician and is interpreted with the help of a large amount of "a priori" knowledge to give a diagnostic finding. During the last 15 years a steadily rising number of attempts have been made to...

The European Federation for Medical Informatics is a regional coordinat- ing body. The Congress in Dublin. MIE 82. from 21st to 25th March 1982. is the fourth in the series following MIE 78 in Cambridge. MIE 79 in Berlin. There was a break in 1980 for the World Congress - MEDINFO 8- in Tokyo. This was followed by MIE 81 in Toulouse. The rationale behind these congresses is the scientific need to share results and ideas. and the educational need to train a wide variety of professional staff in the potential of Medical Informatics in health care delivery. All the caring professions are...

Nuclear ftedicine is not and has not been a purely imaging discipline. It is function analysis that has always been the focal pOint. This fact has become particularly obvious in the last few years through the employment of nev short-lived radionuclides, new technical procedures and data processing. The disadvantage of function analysis in Inclear ftedicine through the use of radioactively labeled compounds is that more and more complicated and expensive equipment his to be used. A further characteristic is that these machines are stationary, and that the patients cannot be examined under...

As a hospital physician it is impossible to escape the notion that the difficult medical problems one encounters are also being confronted by other' physicians throughout the world. It is equally apparent that without special effort one's own patient observations will not be shared with others. Without the medical literature there would be almost no meaningful shadng of experience. Medical textbooks and journals contain reports of the latest tests and treatments. from university hospitals and research centers. There are, however, definite limitations to the medical literature. First. the...

Objective medical decision making has shown itself to be an emerging discipline which is sufficiently robust to promote its further development. This book identifies many important areas for applications in the field of acute patient care. The different approaches require testing, evaluation and mutual co parisons to ensure that the right method is used to solve the existing problem. Medical sciences and patient care are increasingly supported by system sciences, resulting in growing multi- and interdisciplinary research and development areas. In this context, system sciences involve the...

The Working Group 5 of the International Medical Informatics Associa- tion (IMIA) is dedicated to information systems in primary care with special emphasis on computer systems in the doctor's office. Accord- ingly, a conference was held in Hannover in 1980 where the first ap- proaches were described and experiences in system analysis, system construction and evaluation were discussed (Rienhoff, O. and Abrams, M.E. (eds.): The Computer in the Doctor's Office, North-Holland, Amsterdam: 1980). Computer hardware and software development has been rapid over the last years. Thus the prerequisites...