Patent US 8,732,096

The present invention relates to a system and a method of making optimal medical decisions. In one embodiment presented for illustration the system comprises a quantitative model of the disease in the form of transition probabilities, the quantitative model of the effect of the medical treatment (therapy, drug or remedy) on the course of the disease, the quantitative model of costs and benefits, including monetary as well as non-monetary costs and benefits, and the model of preferences with respect to the costs and benefits. Using probabilistic inference, distributions of parameters of models are extracted from the data and the opinions of parties involved in the medical treatment. An expectation of the value of the treatment is computed. Optimality of the treatment is achieved by choosing the treatment or its parameters that give the greatest value given the evidence, the models, and the preferences. Other embodiments are discussed.