Mathematical Models and Medical Decisions

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.