MATH-225N Week 4 Discussion: Probability

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Consider when you are listening to a new patient who says they have had a fever for 3 days. You would use your knowledge and experience with probability to come to a diagnosis. What changes those pr... obabilities? Is it age, is it other symptoms, is it new study results? What is the source of these probabilities and what causes these probabilities to change? This discussion is not to debate diagnoses, but to focus on the sources and influences on probabilities. A probabilistic approach to patient diagnosis is too often taken for granted by both physicians and patients. Although some physicians express their uncertainty as to the probability that the patient has a specified disease, using probability rather than ambiguous terms such as "probably" or "possibly" enables the clinician expresses uncertainty or certainty quantitatively (Liu et al., 2018). Considering the provided case in which the patient has had a fever for three days, the knowledge and experience with probability can be helpful in the diagnosis. Probabilities can be changed by how the patient describes the symptoms; for instance, a clear and accurate description of the symptoms leads to more certain probabilities being generated. Age can also be a factor given that some conditions become amplified with age, and new study results about the condition can also help inform the generation or more accurate probabilities. The source of the probabilities would be clinical journals, besides one’s experience in the field. Tests conducted in a medical lab, besides other diagnostic methods like ultrasound, radiography, and magnetic resonance imaging can cause established probabilities to change. Clinical prediction rules related to the intersection of events and conditional probability can have a notable influence on probabilities (Sargolzaei et al., 2015; Holmes, Illowsky, & Dean, 2018). References This study source was downloaded by 100000831988016 from CourseHero.com on 01-06-2022 10:22:30 GMT -06:00 https://www.coursehero.com/file/45661442/MATH-225N-Week-4-Discussion-Probabilitydocx/ Holmes, A., Illowsky, B. & Dean, S. (2018). Introductory business statistics. Houston, TX: OpenStax Liu, S., Zeng, J., Gong, H., Yang, H., Zhai, J., Cao, Y., ... & Ding, X. (2018). Quantitative analysis of breast cancer diagnosis using a probabilistic modelling approach. Computers in biology and medicine, 92, 168-175. Sargolzaei, S., Cabrerizo, M., Sargolzaei, A., Noei, S., Eddin, A. S., Rajaei, H., ... & Adjouadi, M. (2015). A probabilistic approach for pediatric epilepsy diagnosis using brain functional connectivity networks. BMC bioinformatics, 16(7), S9. [Show More]

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