Mathematical Models and Medical Decisions

3 credits · Graduate

Analytic methods for determining optimal diagnostic and therapeutic decisions with applications to the care of individual patients and the design of policies applied to patient populations. Topics include: utility theory and probability modeling, empirical methods for disease prevalence estimation, probability models for periodic processes, binary decision-making techniques, Markov models of dynamic disease state problems, utility assessment techniques, parametric utility models, utility models for multidimensional outcomes, analysis of time-varying clinical outcomes, and the design of cost-constrained clinical policies. Extensive problem sets compliment the lectures. Prerequisites: introduction to calculus and basic statistics.