Supporting therapy selection in computerized clinical guidelines by means of decision theory.

Supporting therapy selection is a fundamental task for a system for the computerized management of clinical guidelines (GL). The goal is particularly critical when no alternative is really better than the others, from a strictly clinical viewpoint. In these cases, decision theory appears to be a very suitable means to provide advice. In this paper, we describe how algorithms for calculating utility, and for evaluating the optimal policy, can be exploited to fit the GL management context.